Author name: Mike M.

my-3d-printing-journey,-part-2:-printing-upgrades-and-making-mistakes

My 3D printing journey, part 2: Printing upgrades and making mistakes

3D printing, Features, Tech / /

3D-printing new parts for the A1 taught me a lot about plastic, and other things.

Different plastic filament is good for different things (and some kinds don’t work well with the A1 and other open-bed printers). Credit: Andrew Cunningham

Different plastic filament is good for different things (and some kinds don’t work well with the A1 and other open-bed printers). Credit: Andrew Cunningham

For the last three months or so, I’ve been learning to use (and love) a Bambu Labs A1 3D printer, a big, loud machine that sits on my desk and turns pictures on my computer screen into real-world objects.

In the first part of my series about diving into the wild world of 3D printers, I covered what I’d learned about the different types of 3D printers, some useful settings in the Bambu Studio app (which should also be broadly useful to know about no matter what printer you use), and some initial, magical-feeling successes in downloading files that I turned into useful physical items using a few feet of plastic filament and a couple hours of time.

For this second part, I’m focusing on what I learned when I embarked on my first major project—printing upgrade parts for the A1 with the A1. It was here that I made some of my first big 3D printing mistakes, mistakes that prompted me to read up on the different kinds of 3D printer filament, what each type of filament is good for, and which types the A1 is (and is not) good at handling as an un-enclosed, bed-slinging printer.

As with the information in part one, I share this with you not because it is groundbreaking but because there’s a lot of information out there, and it can be an intimidating hobby to break into. By sharing what I learned and what I found useful early in my journey, I hope I can help other people who have been debating whether to take the plunge.

Adventures in recursion: 3D-printing 3D printer parts

A display cover for the A1’s screen will protect it from wear and tear and allow you to easily hide it when you want to. Credit: Andrew Cunningham

My very first project was a holder for my office’s ceiling fan remote. My second, similarly, was a wall-mounted holder for the Xbox gamepad and wired headset I use with my gaming PC, which normally just had to float around loose on my desk when I wasn’t using them.

These were both relatively quick, simple prints that showed the printer was working like it was supposed to—all of the built-in temperature settings, the textured PEI plate, the printer’s calibration and auto-bed-leveling routines added up to make simple prints as dead-easy as Bambu promised they would be. It made me eager to seek out other prints, including stuff on the Makerworld site I hadn’t thought to try yet.

The first problem I had? Well, as part of its pre-print warmup routine, the A1 spits a couple of grams of filament out and tosses it to the side. This is totally normal—it’s called “purging,” and it gets rid of filament that’s gone brittle from being heated too long. If you’re changing colors, it also clears any last bits of the previous color that are still in the nozzle. But it didn’t seem particularly elegant to have the printer eternally launching little knots of plastic onto my desk.

The A1’s default design just ejects little molten wads of plastic all over your desk when it’s changing or purging filament. This is one of many waste bin (or “poop bucket”) designs made to catch and store these bits and pieces. Credit: Andrew Cunningham

The solution to this was to 3D-print a purging bucket for the A1 (also referred to, of course, as a “poop bucket” or “poop chute.”) In fact, there are tons of purging buckets designed specifically for the A1 because it’s a fairly popular budget model and there’s nothing stopping people from making parts that fit it like a glove.

I printed this bucket, as well as an additional little bracket that would “catch” the purged filament and make sure it fell into the bucket. And this opened the door to my first major printing project: printing additional parts for the printer itself.

I took to YouTube and watched a couple of videos on the topic because I’m apparently far from the first person who has had this reaction to the A1. After much watching and reading, here are the parts I ended up printing:

  • Bambu Lab AMS Lite Top Mount and Z-Axis Stiffener: The Lite version of Bambu’s Automated Materials System (AMS) is the optional accessory that enables multi-color printing for the A1. And like the A1 itself, it’s a lower-cost, open-air version of the AMS that works with Bambu’s more expensive printers.
    • The AMS Lite comes with a stand that you can use to set it next to the A1, but that’s more horizontal space than I had to spare. This top mount is Bambu’s official solution for putting the AMS Lite on top of the A1 instead, saving you some space.
    • The top mount actually has two important components: the top mount itself and a “Z-Axis Stiffener,” a pair of legs that extend behind the A1 to make the whole thing more stable on a desk or table. Bambu already recommends 195 mm (or 7.7 inches) of “safety margin” behind the A1 to give the bed room to sling, so if you’ve left that much space behind the printer, you probably have enough space for these legs.
    • After installing all of these parts, the top mount, and a fully loaded AMS, it’s probably a good idea to run the printer’s calibration cycle again to account for the difference in balance.
    • You may want to print the top mount itself with PETG, which is a bit stronger and more impact-resistant than PLA plastic.
  • A1 Purge Waste Bin and Deflector, by jimbobble. There are approximately 1 million different A1 purge bucket designs, each with its own appeal. But this one is large and simple and includes a version that is compatible with the printer Z-Axis Stiffener legs.
  • A1 rectangular fan cover, by Arzhang Lotfi. There are a bunch of options for this, including fun ones, but you can find dozens of simple grille designs that snap in place and protect the fan on the A1’s print head.
  • Bambu A1 Adjustable Camera Holder, by mlodybuk: This one’s a little more complicated because it does require some potentially warranty-voiding disassembly of components. The A1’s camera is also pretty awful no matter how you position it, with sub-1 FPS video that’s just barely suitable for checking on whether a print has been ruined or not.
    • But if you want to use it, I’d highly recommend moving it from the default location, which is low down and at an odd angle, so you’re not getting the best view of your print that you can.
    • This print includes a redesigned cover for the camera area, a filler piece to fill the hole where the camera used to be to keep dust and other things from getting inside the printer, and a small camera receptacle that snaps in place onto the new cover and can be turned up and down.
    • If you’re not comfortable modding your machine like this, the camera is livable as-is, but this got me a much better vantage point on my prints.

With a little effort, this print allows you to reposition the A1’s camera, giving you a better angle on your prints and making it adjustable. Credit: Andrew Cunningham

  • A1 Screen Protector New Release, by Rox3D: Not strictly necessary, but an unobtrusive way to protect (and to “turn off”) the A1’s built-in LCD screen when it’s not in use. The hinge mechanism of this print is stiff enough that the screen cover can be lifted partway without flopping back down.
  • A1 X-Axis Cover, by Moria3DPStudio: Another only-if-you-want-it print, this foldable cover slides over the A1’s exposed rail when you’re not using it. Just make sure you take it back off before you try to print anything—it won’t break anything, but the printer won’t be happy with you. Not that I’m speaking from experience.
  • Ultimate Filament Spool Enclosure for the AMS Lite, by Supergrapher: Here’s the big one, and it’s a true learning experience for all kinds of things. The regular Bambu AMS system for the P- and X-series printers is enclosed, which is useful not just for keeping dust from settling on your filament spools but for controlling humidity and keeping spools you’ve dried from re-absorbing moisture. There’s no first-party enclosure for the AMS Lite, but this user-created enclosure is flexible and popular, and it can be used to enclose the AMS Lite whether you have it mounted on top of or to the side of the A1. The small plastic clips that keep the lids on are mildly irritating to pop on and off, relative to a lid that you can just lift up and put back down, but the benefits are worth it.
  • 3D Disc for A1 – “Pokéball,” by BS 3D Print: One of the few purely cosmetic parts I’ve printed. The little spinning bit on the front of the A1’s print head shows you when the filament is being extruded, but it’s not a functional part. This is just one of dozens and dozens of cosmetic replacements for it if you choose to pop it off.
  • Sturdy Modular Filament Spool Rack, by Antiphrasis: Not technically an upgrade for the A1, but an easy recommendation for any new 3D printers who suddenly find themselves with a rainbow of a dozen-plus different filaments you want to try. Each shelf here holds three spools of filament, and you can print additional shelves to spread them out either horizontally, vertically, or both, so you can make something that exactly meets your needs and fits your space. A two-by-three shelf gave me room for 18 spools, and I can print more if I need them.

There are some things that others recommend for the A1 that I haven’t printed yet—mainly guides for cables, vibration dampeners for the base, and things to reinforce areas of possible stress for the print head and the A1’s loose, dangly wire.

Part of the fun is figuring out what your problems are, identifying prints that could help solve the problem, and then trying them out to see if they do solve your problem. (The parts have also given my A1 its purple accents, since a bright purple roll of filament was one of the first ones my 5-year-old wanted to get.)

Early mistakes

The “Z-Axis stiffener,” an extra set of legs for the A1 that Bambu recommends if you top-mount your AMS Lite. This took me three tries to print, mainly because of my own inexperience. Credit: Andrew Cunningham

Printing each of these parts gave me a solid crash course into common pitfalls and rookie mistakes.

For example, did you know that ABS plastic doesn’t print well on an open-bed printer? Well, it doesn’t! But I didn’t know that when I bought a spool of ABS to print some parts that I wanted to be sturdier and more resistant to wear and tear. I’d open the window and leave the room to deal with the fumes and be fine, I figured.

I tried printing the Z-Axis Stiffener supports for the A1 in ABS, but they went wonky. Lower bed temperature and (especially) ambient temperature tends to make ABS warp and curl upward, and extrusion-based printers rely on precision to do their thing. Once a layer—any layer!—gets screwed up during a print, that will reverberate throughout the entire rest of the object. Which is why my first attempt at supports ended up being totally unusable.

Large ABS plastic prints are tough to do on an open-bed printer. You can see here how that lower-left corner peeled upward slightly from the print bed, and any unevenness in the foundation of your print is going to reverberate in the layers that are higher up. Credit: Andrew Cunningham

I then tried printing another set of supports with PLA plastic, ones that claimed to maintain their sturdiness while using less infill (that is, how much plastic is actually used inside the print to give it rigidity—around 15 percent is typically a good balance between rigidity and wasting plastic that you’ll never see, though there may be times when you want more or less). I’m still not sure what I did, but the prints I got were squishy and crunchy to the touch, a clear sign that the amount and/or type of infill wasn’t sufficient. It wasn’t until my third try—the original Bambu-made supports, in PLA instead of ABS—that I made supports I could actually use.

An attempt at printing the same part with PLA, but with insufficient infill plastic that left my surfaces rough and the interiors fragile and crunchy. I canceled this one about halfway through when it became clear that something wasn’t right. Credit: Andrew Cunningham

After much reading and research, I learned that for most things, PETG plastic is what you use if you want to make sturdier (and outdoor-friendly) prints on an open bed. Great! I decided I’d print most of the A1 ABS enclosure with clear PETG filament to make something durable that I could also see through when I wanted to see how much filament was left on a given spool.

This ended up being a tricky first experiment with PETG plastic for three different reasons. For one, printing “clear” PETG that actually looks clear is best done with a larger nozzle (Bambu offers 0.2 mm, 0.6 mm, and 0.8 mm nozzles for the A1, in addition to the default 0.4 mm) because you can get the same work done in fewer layers, and the more layers you have, the less “clear” that clear plastic will be. Fine!

The Inland-brand clear PETG+ I bought from our local Micro Center also didn’t love the default temperature settings for generic PETG that the A1 uses, both for the heatbed and the filament itself; plastic flowed unevenly from the nozzle and was prone to coming detached from the bed. If this is happening to you (or if you want to experiment with lowering your temperatures to save a bit of energy), going into Bambu Studio, nudging temperatures by 5 degrees in either direction, and trying a quick test print (I like this one) helped me dial in my settings when using unfamiliar filament.

This homebrewed enclosure for the AMS Lite multi-color filament switcher (and the top mount that sticks it on the top of the printer) has been my biggest and most complex print to date. An 0.8 mm nozzle and some settings changes are recommended to maximize the transparency of transparent PETG filament. Credit: Andrew Cunningham

Finally, PETG is especially prone to absorbing ambient moisture. When that moisture hits a 260° nozzle, it quickly evaporates, and that can interfere with the evenness of the flow rate and the cleanliness of your print (this usually manifests as “stringing,” fine, almost cotton-y strands that hang off your finished prints).

You can buy dedicated filament drying boxes or stick spools in an oven at a low temperature for a few hours if this really bothers you or if it’s significant enough to affect the quality of your prints. One of the reasons to have an enclosure is to create a humidity-controlled environment to keep your spools from absorbing too much moisture in the first place.

The temperature and nozzle-size adjustments made me happy enough with my PETG prints that I was fine to pick off the little fuzzy stringers that were on my prints afterward, but your mileage may vary.

These are just a few examples of the kinds of things you learn if you jump in with both feet and experiment with different prints and plastics in rapid succession. Hopefully, this advice helps you avoid my specific mistakes. But the main takeaway is that experience is the best teacher.

The wide world of plastics

I used filament to print a modular filament shelf for my filaments. Credit: Andrew Cunningham

My wife had gotten me two spools of filament, a white and a black spool of Bambu’s own PLA Basic. What does all of that mean?

No matter what you’re buying, it’s most commonly sold in 1 kilogram spools (the weight of the plastic, not the plastic and the spool together). Each thing you print will give you an estimate of how much filament, in grams, you’ll need to print it.

There are quite a few different types of plastics out there, on Bambu’s site and in other stores. But here are the big ones I found out about almost immediately:

Polylactic acid, or PLA

By far the most commonly used plastic, PLA is inexpensive, available in a huge rainbow of colors and textures, and has a relatively low melting point, making it an easy material for most 3D printers to work with. It’s made of renewable material rather than petroleum, which makes it marginally more environmentally friendly than some other kinds of plastic. And it’s easy to “finish” PLA-printed parts if you’re trying to make props, toys, or other objects that you don’t want to have that 3D printed look about them, whether you’re sanding those parts or using a chemical to smooth the finish.

The downside is that it’s not particularly resilient—sitting in a hot car or in direct sunlight for very long is enough to melt or warp it, which makes it a bad choice for anything that needs to survive outdoors or anything load-bearing. Its environmental bona fides are also a bit oversold—it is biodegradable, but it doesn’t do so quickly outside of specialized composting facilities. If you throw it in the trash and it goes to a landfill, it will still take its time returning to nature.

You’ll find a ton of different kinds of PLA out there. Some have additives that give them a matte or silky texture. Some have little particles of wood or metal or even coffee or spent beer grains embedded in them, meant to endow 3D printed objects with the look, feel, or smell of those materials.

Some PLA just has… some other kind of unspecified additive in it. You’ll see “PLA+” all over the place, but as far as I can tell, there is no industry-wide agreed-upon standard for what the plus is supposed to mean. Manufacturers sometimes claim it’s stronger than regular PLA; other terms like “PLA Pro” and “PLA Max” are similarly non-standardized and vague.

Polyethylene terephthalate glycol, or PETG

PET is a common household plastic, and you’ll find it in everything from clothing fibers to soda bottles. PETG is the same material, with ethylene glycol (the “G”) added to lower the melting point and make it less prone to crystallizing and warping. It also makes it more transparent, though trying to print anything truly “transparent” with an extrusion printer is difficult.

PETG has a higher melting point than PLA, but it’s still lower than other kinds of plastics. This makes PETG a good middle ground for some types of printing. It’s better than PLA for functional load-bearing parts and outdoor use because it’s stronger and able to bend a bit without warping, but it’s still malleable enough to print well on all kinds of home 3D printers.

PETG can still be fussier to work with than PLA. I more frequently had issues with the edges of my PETG prints coming unstuck from the bed of the printer before the print was done.

PETG filament is also especially susceptible to absorbing moisture from the air, which can make extrusion messier. My PETG prints have usually had lots of little wispy strings of plastic hanging off them by the end—not enough to affect the strength or utility of the thing I’ve printed but enough that I needed to pull the strings off to clean up the print once it was done. Drying the filament properly could help with that if I ever need the prints to be cleaner in the first place.

It’s also worth noting that PETG is the strongest kind of filament that an open-bed printer like the A1 can handle reliably. You can succeed with other plastics, but Reddit anecdotes, my own personal experience, and Bambu’s filament guide all point to a higher level of difficulty.

Acrylonitrile butadiene styrene, or ABS

“Going to look at the filament wall at Micro Center” is a legit father-son activity at this point. Credit: Andrew Cunningham

You probably have a lot of ABS plastic in your life. Game consoles and controllers, the plastic keys on most keyboards, Lego bricks, appliances, plastic board game pieces—it’s mostly ABS.

Thin layers of ABS stuck together aren’t as strong or durable as commercially manufactured injection-molded ABS, but it’s still more heat-resistant and durable than 3D-printed PLA or PETG.

There are two big issues specific to ABS, which are also outlined in Bambu’s FAQ for the A1. The first is that it doesn’t print well on an open-bed printer, especially for larger prints. The corners are more prone to pulling up off the print bed, and as with a house, any problems in your foundation will reverberate throughout the rest of your print.

The second is fumes. All 3D-printed plastics emit fumes when they’ve been melted, and a good rule of thumb is to at least print things in a room where you can open the window (and not in a room where anyone or anything sleeps). But ABS and ASA plastics in particular can emit fumes that cause eye and respiratory irritation, headaches, and nausea if you’re printing them indoors with insufficient ventilation.

As for what quantity of printing counts as “dangerous,” there’s no real consensus, and the studies that have been done mostly land in inconclusive “further study is needed” territory. At a bare minimum, it’s considered a best practice to at least be able to open a window if you’re printing with ABS or to use a closed-bed printer in an unoccupied part of your home, like a garage, shed, or workshop space (if you have one).

Acrylonitrile styrene acrylate, or ASA

Described to me by Ars colleague Lee Hutchinson as “ABS but with more UV resistance,” this material is even better suited for outdoor applications than the other plastics on this list.

But also like ABS, you’ll have a hard time getting good results with an open-bed printer, and the fumes are more harmful to inhale. You’ll want a closed-bed printer and decent ventilation for good results.

Thermoplastic polyurethane, or TPU

TPU is best known for its flexibility relative to the other kinds of plastics on this list. It doesn’t get as brittle when it’s cold and has more impact-resistance, and it can print reasonably well on an open-bed printer.

One downside of TPU is that you need to print slowly to get reliably good results—a pain, when even relatively simple fidget toys can take an hour or two to print at full speed using PLA. Longer prints mean more power use and more opportunities for your print to peel off the print bed. A roll of TPU filament will also usually run you a few dollars more than a roll of PLA, PETG, or ABS.

First- or third-party filament?

The first-party Bambu spools have RFID chips in them that Bambu printers can scan to automatically show the type and color of filament that it is and to keep track of how much filament you have remaining. Bambu also has temperature and speed presets for all of its first-party filaments built into the printer and the Bambu Studio software. There are presets for a few other filament brands in the printer, but I usually ended up using the “generic” presets, which may need some tuning to ensure the best possible adhesion to the print bed and extrusion from the nozzle.

I mostly ended up using Inland-branded filament I picked up from my local Micro Center—both because it’s cheaper than Bambu’s first-party stuff and because it’s faster and easier for me to get to. If you don’t have a brick-and-mortar hobby store with filaments in stock, the A1 and other printers sometimes come with some sample filament swatches so you can see the texture and color of the stuff you’re buying online.

What’s next?

Part of the fun of 3D printing is that it can be used for a wide array of projects—organizing your desk or your kitchen, printing out little fidget-toy favors for your kid’s birthday party, printing out replacement parts for little plastic bits and bobs that have broken, or just printing out decorations and other objects you’ll enjoy looking at.

Once you’re armed with all of the basic information in this guide, the next step is really up to you. What would you find fun or useful? What do you need? How can 3D printing help you with other household tasks or hobbies that you might be trying to break into? For the last part of this series, the Ars staffers with 3D printers at home will share some of their favorite prints—hearing people talk about what they’d done themselves really opened my eyes to the possibilities and the utility of these devices, and more personal testimonials may help those of you who are on the fence to climb down off of it.

Photo of Andrew Cunningham

Andrew is a Senior Technology Reporter at Ars Technica, with a focus on consumer tech including computer hardware and in-depth reviews of operating systems like Windows and macOS. Andrew lives in Philadelphia and co-hosts a weekly book podcast called Overdue.

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dating-roundup-#5:-opening-day

Dating Roundup #5: Opening Day

Dating / /

Previously: #1, #2, #3, #4.

Since we all know that dating apps are terrible, the wise person seeks to meet prospective dates in other ways, ideally in the physical world.

Alas, this has gotten more difficult. Dating apps and shifting norms mean it is considered less appropriate, and riskier, to approach strangers, especially with romantic intent, or to even ask people you know out on a date, which has a fat tail of life changing positive consequences.

People especially men are increasingly more afraid of rejection and other negative consequences, including a potential long tail of large negative consequences. Also people’s skills at doing this aren’t developing, which both decreases chances of success and increases risk. So a lot of this edition is about tackling those basic questions, especially risk, rejection and fear.

There’s also the question of how to be more hot and know roughly how hot you are, and what other traits also help your chances. And there’s the question of selection. You want to go after the targets worth going after, especially good particular matches.

  1. You’re Single Because Hello Human Resources.

  2. You’re Single Because You Don’t Meet Anyone’s Standards.

  3. You’re Single Because You Don’t Know How to Open.

  4. You’re Single Because You Never Open.

  5. You’re Single Because You Don’t Know How to Flirt.

  6. You’re Single Because You Won’t Wear the Fucking Hat.

  7. You’re Single Because You Don’t Focus On The People You Want.

  8. You’re Single Because You Choose the Wrong Hobbies.

  9. You’re Single Because You Friend Zone People.

  10. You’re Single Because You Won’t Go the Extra Mile.

  11. You’re Single Because You’re Overly Afraid of Highly Unlikely Consequences.

  12. You’re Single Because You’re Too Afraid of Rejection.

  13. You’re Single Because You’re Paralyzed by Fear.

  14. You’re Single Because You’re Not Hot Enough.

  15. You’re Single Because You Can’t Tell How Hot You Look.

  16. You’re Single Because You Have the Wrong Hairstyle.

  17. You’re Single Because You’re In the Wrong Place.

  18. You’re Single Because You Didn’t Hire a Matchmaker.

  19. You’re Single So Here’s the Lighter Side.

Not all approaches and opens are wanted, which is fine given the risk versus reward. Also it’s worth noting that this is actually a remarkably small amount of not being attracted to the approacher?

Alexander: I have updated this chart on the old article, because it was confusing some people.

As stated in the article, these responses were not mutually exclusive. 50% of women did not say that they didn’t want to be approached exclusively because a man was unattractive. Only 16% of the women who said they experienced an unwanted approach cited unattractiveness exclusively.

This was also not the full female sample – 34% of women did not have an unwanted approach experience at all.

I have added an UpSet plot to the article if you want to visualise the sets of responses. But what it basically boils down to is that 84% of women who had an unwanted approach experience cited something aside from a mere lack of attraction.

Remember, these are exclusively unwanted approaches.

Presumably, in the wanted approaches, the women was indeed attracted.

This still leaves the ‘there were other problems but you were sufficiently attractive that I disregarded them’ problem. Not getting any bonus points is already enough to make things tricky, you’ll need otherwise stronger circumstances. It does seem clear that men are far too worried about being insufficiently attractive to do approaches.

Big B (19.5m views): I hate when yall applaud men for doing the bare minimum.

Honey Badger Radio (20m views): Genuine question. What is the ‘bare minimum’ for women?

Punished Rose: 6’5”, blue eyes, still has all his hair, good job in position of power with many underlings, ubers me everywhere, buys me diamonds, kind to animals, wants 3-4 children, good relationship with mother, spontaneous and romantic, PhD with no corrections, homeowner.

[Here’s what you get in return from her, men!]

Aella: I think it’s less how exactly men have their stat points distributed, and more how many total stat points there are. Women will often tolerate dump stats if there’s enough perks to balance out other areas.

You have to notice the perks for them to count, which is tough on dating apps if the dump stat is too visible, but mostly yeah, and I think it’s true for everyone. Each person will usually have some particular actual dealbreaker-level requirements or at least very expensive places to miss, plus some things really do override everything else, but mostly everything is trade-offs.

Amit Kumar: Smile at cute strangers and shouted upon 😂

Blaine Anderson: I surveyed >13,000 single women last year and exactly 95% said they wish they were approached more often IRL by men.

If women *shoutwhen you approach, you’re doing something wrong ❤️

Poll of my friend Ben Daly’s Instagram following, which is virtually all single 18-34 yr old women in the U.S. and U.K.

For anyone trying to learn, I teach a program called Approach Academy (~$100).

I have no idea if Approach Academy is any good, and doubtless there are lots of free resources out there too. Either way, it’s an important skill to have, and if you are single, don’t want to be single and don’t have the skill it’s worth learning.

If you’re literally not trying at all, that’s definitely not going to work. Alas, from what I can tell Alexander is correct here, in that even the very spaces where the You Had One Job was ‘actually approach women’ are increasingly coming out firmly against the one thing that ever works, and moving from an agentic narrative where you can make it work to an anti-agentic one where you shouldn’t try.

Alexander: Of everything I have ever posted, nothing has received more pushback from the manosphere than pointing out that half of young men have not asked a woman on a date in the past year, and a quarter have never asked a woman on a date ever.

The “male loneliness crisis” is largely self-imposed.

That you must approach women and ask them on a date, assuming you do not want to be perpetually single, would be the most obvious and basic advice you would have been given on early pickup artistry or relationship advice forums.

When I write of the relationship advice becoming increasingly negative, this is what I mean. Instead of ascribing agency to men and giving them the most obvious and “actionable advice” (“you need to talk to women”), the entire space is littered with narrative excuses for why men cannot!

“But what about MeToo?”

“Women do not want to be approached.”

“Women only want a ‘Chad’ type.”

“Women are not good enough to approach.”

“It is not men’s fault—the entire fabric of society needs to change to make it easy for men to approach.”

Anti-agentic narratives. Excuses. None of these are “actionable advice.” No one telling you these things is giving you a “solution.” They are just complaining and want to vent their victimhood.

Occasionally the feedback I receive is, “You describe things well, but provide no advice.”

Probably true! I do not really make self-help content. Yet I do regularly tell you all the very basic things that work:

  1. You need to talk to women.

  2. You need exciting, social hobbies that put you in contact with women and that women like.

  3. You need to rid yourself of antisocial vices, hobbies, and habits.

  4. You need to hit the gym and lose weight.

  5. You need to fix your physical appearance.

You are all free to work the details of these things out however you please, but these are the basics that cover how you meet women and if you pass the initial bar of attraction. They are obvious and do not require you to know any hidden secrets or subscribe to any fringe ideological beliefs.

The manosphere overall, as well as individual subcultures within it like the Red Pill, have shifted from agentic messaging to anti-agentic messaging over time.

It used to be, “It’s really easy to put yourself in the top 10% of men.” Now you are much more likely to see lamentations that women only want the top 10% – and they are so unreasonable and unfair for that!

Narratives used to be primarily individualistic and agentic: you can self-improve and fundamentally change. You can get the results you want in life.

Now the narratives are collectivist and social: society is responsible for men’s romantic outcomes. They copy the language and paradigms of left-wing social justice movements. Men are victims – men are not at fault nor responsible for their own life trajectories. The only solution is a massive change to the culture, laws, and society at large.

Matthew Yglesias: We need industrial policy for asking girls out.

Do today’s young men know about negging? Peacocking? Do we need a Game Czar to address this crisis?

Matthew Yglesias: If you ask a bunch of girls out, some of them will go out with you, whereas if you don’t, none of them will.

As in, in order to open, you need to be there at all, and that’s the 80% for showing up.

Nick Gray: his is a message for single men that are tired of online dating

I made a post 6 months ago about what I should text a woman that I was going on a date with

The date was great. In fact we have spent almost every day since then together

Now she’s my girlfriend

Guys if you’re frustrated with online dating I have some advice

Delete your dating apps and start going out every single day

You need to the gym, go to the grocery store, go work from cafes

You need to try a new group fitness class every other day, go to yoga and pilates, and join meetups for things you’re interested in

Be someone who is out and about

Talk to strangers, make friendly conversation, add value, and don’t be sketchy

[continues but you can guess the rest, the central idea is ‘irl surface area.’]

Yet, despite knowing that fortune favors the bold, many continue not to ever try.

Julian: Today my dad asked me if I ever approach beautiful women on the street to ask them out. I told him that I’ve literally never done that, and I saw true sorrow in his eyes.

“You see dad there’s this thing called hinge, it’s a lot easier really, it’s not as scary.” 😢

Having a tweet go viral is actually almost never good. now nearly 2 million people know I am scared of talking to women.

Twitter when I have a cool idea about AI safety to share: 😴💤🛌🥱

Twitter when my dad implies I have no rizz: 👀‼️🚨

Implies? Flat out tells you. Or you flat out telling him. Do better.

Indeed, we seem to keep hearing stories like this reasonably often? It’s not this easy, but also it can be a lot easier than people think.

Val: How do people get girlfriends? I’m being serious.

Critter: A college friend of mine was single his whole life. He was getting depressed and asked for my advice. I told him to ask out 20 people on casual dates. He asked two; the second one became his girlfriend. It’s that simple.

“But no, I want to swipe from the bathroom and have a series of convoluted online conversations that go nowhere.” Okay, do that then. Enjoy.

My friend was average-looking, 5 feet 8 inches tall, and deaf, but keep enjoying your fantasy that you have it hard.

Nobody: Got a girlfriend once because I accidentally smiled and waved at her, thinking she was someone I knew.

Konrad Curze: I literally asked a coworker on a date once because I heard her talking about wanting to see a movie and not having a ride to the theater, so I just asked her if she wanted to go a bit before her shift ended. We’re not together anymore, but it really is that easy—just ask someone in person.

liberforce: I once talked to a complete stranger at the train station. She was a tourist in her first week in my country. After losing sight of each other, one year later we got married. We have been married for the past 10 years and have a 7-year-old son. Be polite. Be confident. Try.

Critter: “What is a low-key date?”

It’s a date that’s a small investment and easy to say yes to. Lunch this weekend. Studying together in the library. Getting coffee. Going to a local event.

Think of something you might say yes to if a friend asked, even if you… Do I ask friends/acquaintances?

Be careful; asking someone out can possibly damage your network of friends, employee relations, etc. I wouldn’t ask 20 coworkers out; you will get a reputation.

Only ask friends or coworkers if you have some confidence it’s a yes.

Asking strangers is cost-free, but we’re busy.

“Then who do I ask?”

I’ve gone on dates with waitresses (ask after their shift), Starbucks employees, and girls on the subway. If you’re attracted to someone, be cool and direct, and just ask.

“What do I say?”

Ask as if you were asking someone for the time or where the nearest gas station is.

“Hey, I think you’re really beautiful. Can I buy you lunch/coffee sometime this weekend?”

It’s *betterto chat them up first, but if you can’t, just ask.

“How do I avoid seeming creepy/awkward?”

This isn’t risk-free. Some may think you’re a creep, others will be flattered. Outcomes are hard to control; intent is what matters.

Try not to get too wound up; creepiness is a result of intensity. Timing matters, but just relax and ask.

Many such cases. When single, and it’s safe and appropriate, always be flirting.

Annie: this is why as a prolific slut I just flirt with any person up to my standards and escalate until I receive any sort of pushback.

That might actually be correct, if you’re good at noticing subtle pushback, at least within the realm of the deniable and until they clearly know you’re flirting. If they can’t tell you’re flirting, then you kind of aren’t flirting yet, so you’re probably fine to escalate a bit, repeat until they notice.

Online makes it even trickier, what even is flirting? It turns out Lolita’s likes here were on Instagram, where I am led to believe this is indeed how this works, whereas on Twitter the odds this is what is happening are lower – but yeah, DM her anyway if you’re interested.

The Catholic Engineer: Attention boys. This is how girls shoot their shot on Twitter. Take note.

Lolita: I just wanna let everyone know (since apparently this is everyone’s business now🤣) that he indeed texted me [on Instagram], he isn’t as [stupid] as men on twitter, thank God. ☝🏻😌

Divia: Tag yourself I’m the “I’m not sure how old you are” married person who follows and likes a few posts just because.

Linch: I feel someone calling themselves “Lolita” may have a non-standard opinion of good dating strategies, or norms.

Divida: lol yes ty I missed that part.

Ian Hines: I’m the guy who has apparently flirted with dozens of women without realizing it.

Andrew Rettek: By this standard a lot of unavailable women are flirting with me on Twitter.

Normie MacDonald: Something I routinely find myself telling people in regards to dating in relationships is that they have no reason to be creating these arbitrary meaningless ego saving rules for themselves. Ok congratulations you don’t “text first” you saved your imaginary dignity while the other girl gets an engagement ring

The dance matters. Ideally you want to do the minimum required to get an escalation in response, where that escalation will filter for further interest and skill. I would certainly try to do that first. But if it doesn’t work, and this wasn’t a marginal situation? Time to escalate anyway.

The deniability is not only key to the system working and enabling you to make moves you wouldn’t otherwise be able to make. It’s also fun, at least for many women.

Also, it’s essential. As in, you try to think of a counterexample, and you fail:

Emmett Shear: What is (flirting minus plausible deniability)?

Misha: “Hey there handsome.” Is flirtatious and undeniable.

As confirmed by Claude, there’s still plenty of plausible deniability there, and full uncertainty on how far you intend to go with it. Ambiguity and plausible deniability between ‘harmless fun’ flirting versus ‘actually going somewhere’ flirting is a large part of the deniability, and also the core mechanism.

Periodically we rediscover the classic tricks, which is half of what TikTok is good for. In this case, something called ‘sticky eyes,’ where you make eye contact until they make eye contact back, then act like you’re caught and look away. Then look at them, and this time when they match don’t look away, and often they’ll walk right to you.

I do not believe any of this below is how any of this worked in literal detail, but…

WoolyAI: That stupid fucking hat.

This is doing the rounds and, like all gender and feminist discourse, it’s fundamentally dishonest. You can read two dozen other restacks laying out the limitations of this article, all ignoring that she’s a freelance writer, ie poor, and she’s writing for clicks; hate the game, not the player.

I still cannot get over that stupid fucking hat. It worked.

Look, that hat worked. That stupid fucking hat got Mystery laid more than I’ve been laid in my entire life unless 90% of what was written in “The Game” is a lie. Women like the hat. Women slept with him over the hat. And we can’t be honest about it.

It worked on me. It worked on all of us. 20 effing years later that stupid hat is still the #1 image of PUAs and Mystery is still the most famous of them, not because of anything he did, but just because if you put that stupid fucking hat in a thumbnail, people will click on it because we can’t not pay attention to that stupid fucking hat.

That stupid fucking hat worked and I wouldn’t wear it and you wouldn’t wear it but it brought him more sex and fame than anyone reading this has ever got and we can’t be honest about it and that’s why the discourse never goes anywhere.

If you actually read the book, Mystery is an insanely broken individual but he lived a literal rockstar lifestyle because he was willing to wear that stupid fucking hat and I kinda envy him for it. Just the shameless “I want women, women want the hat, therefore I will wear the hat.”

But the discourse feels stuck because women are ashamed they like the stupid fucking hat and men would be ashamed to wear the stupid fucking hat so we all lie about it so we don’t have to live with the shame of who we are.

(Pictured: That fucking hat.)

The stupid fucking hat was successful for Mystery in particular, as it played into the rest of what he was doing, leading interactions down predictable paths he trained for in various ways, and that he figured out how to steer in the ways he wanted.

But also, yes, it was his willingness to wear the stupid fucking hat, if that’s what it took to make all that work. That doesn’t mean you should go out and wear your own literal stupid fucking hat, but… be willing, as needed, to wear the metaphorical stupid fucking hat. If that’s what it takes.

Cosmic Cowgirl: The only dating strategy worth your time is to be as weird as humanly possible and see who rocks with it

The best part abt this tweet is seeing all the people responding that the way they met their partners/spouses is by being weird ❤️ there is hope for us weirdos yet!

Not quite. You should be exactly as weird as you are. Being intentionally extra weird would backfire. But yes, you mostly want to avoid hiding your weird once you are finished ‘getting reps.’

Should you put your small painted war figurines in your profile? One woman says no but many men say yes.

Shoshana Weissmann: Hey men, please don’t put the small war figurines you’ve painted in your Hinge profiles. This does not help.

We will date you sometimes despite this, but…

Yes, they were well-painted. Please stop asking.

Jarvis: It can’t hurt.

Shoshana: No, Jarvis.

If you’re looking to maximize total opportunities, you definitely don’t put things like painted war figurines in your photo.

However they offer positive selection to the extent you consider the relevant selection positive, so it depends, and a balance must be struck. I would only include them if I really, really cared about war figurines.

Teach the debate: Andrew Rettek versus Razib Khan on letting your interest flags fly. Should you worry about most of the attractive women losing interest if you talk about space exploration, abstruse philosophy and existential risk? Only to the extent you’d be interested in them despite knowing they react that way. So gain, ideally, once you’ve got your reps in, no.

As usual, if you’re still on the steep part of the dating learning curve, one must first ‘get the reps’ before it wise to overly narrow one’s focus.

You can also make other life choices to increase your chances. If you are a furry, you might do well to go into nuclear engineering, if that otherwise interests you? At some point the doom loop cannot be stopped, might as well go with it.

Eneasz Brodski suggests to straight men: Look for a woman who likes men. As in, a woman who says outright that by default men are good and cool people to be around. He says this is rare, and thus not all that actionable. I think it’s not that rare.

I would say that the specific positive version could be hard to act on, but the generalized negative version seems like fine advice across the board and highly actionable. If someone actively dislikes people in your key reference classes, whichever reference classes those might be, then probably don’t date them. The more of your reference classes they actively like by default, the better.

The same principles are true for women seeking men, and the same is true for physical goals. You should care relatively little about general appeal, and care more about appeal to those you find appealing as long term partners.

Antunes: Dear women, We don’t want you with muscles. We want you slim, delicate and cute. Take notes.

The rich: Dear women, muscles are hot, and there are many fit gym rats who would love a workout partner. Appealing to the average man is a bad idea; better to appeal to a small group that is very interested in you (with favorable gender ratios).

Daniel: I still think he’s wrong about the average man not wanting a fit woman.

In particular, the men like Antues who actively mock anyone who disagrees on this? Turning them off actively is not a bug. It’s a feature.

Isabel: Question for women in their 30s, 40s, 50s, etc: what are women in their twenties not considering that they should be considering?

Mason: Waste zero time on men who don’t want the same things you want, you will not look back fondly on relationships built on the hope that someone else would change.

The original thread has much other advice, also of the standard variety. I would modify Mason’s note slightly, do not waste time on the chance someone else will change what they want. But of course there are other ways for time to be well spent.

On the flip side:

Girl explains why she does not like ‘extreme gym guy’ bodies, she wants the mechanic with real muscles in natural settings.

Freia: Every woman i talk to is like nooo too much muscle is weird and they’re imagining competition season mr. olympia in their head or something but every guy i talk to is like yeah i started lifting and all of a sudden women found me 10 times funnier.

This is an easy one.

  1. Up to a point more muscle is good.

  2. Too much ‘unnatural’ or ‘gym style’ muscle is weird.

  3. If you never do muscle poses you do not have too much such muscle.

  4. If you are musclephotomaxing, you may have too much muscle for other purposes.

Choose your fighter.

Rachel Lapides: The undergrad creative writing class I’m teaching has 19 girls and 1 boy.

I think a lot of you in the replies would benefit from a class or two.

Zina Sarif: Who will tell them?

Vers La Lune: This needs to be said. Reading is not an attractive hobby to women. Back in 2018ish I A/B tested it and hid my books and actively lied about not reading a book since college and it worked 10x better than honesty.

It’s attractive hobby “in theory” but most people don’t read shit anyway, maybe they read Literotica fairy smut or something but you’ll never see panties drier than if you reference David Foster Wallace or some history book or something.

The rest of that chart is fine. Knowing languages and instruments are absolutely the most attractive to them.

Robin Hanson: Would this result hold up in a larger randomized trial?

I think Vers is right about this. Reading is attractive in theory.

In practice, it is not unattractive. But that is a different thing. You need to have a hook that is attractive in practice.

Reading can and does help with that. Reading leads to knowledge and skills and being interesting, which are themselves attractive. You want to be readmaxing. But that, too, is a different thing.

When 98.2% of women said reading was ‘attractive’ in a binary choice, that was answering the wrong question. Associating with reading simply is not exciting. It does not offer a joint experience or a good time. It won’t work.

Whereas the other top activities represent skills and demonstrations of value and joint activities. So they’re great for this.

The flip side are the actively unattractive hobbies. Reading is not unattractive, it will almost never actively cost you points, but Magic, anime and crypto definitely will be highly unattractive and turn off a large percentage of women, if you force them to deal with those things front and center. If you don’t center them, my guess is they are like reading, they don’t end up counting much for or against you then.

Of course, there will be some women that does find almost any hobby attractive, and the positive selection as noted above is palpable. But you only get so many such filters, so choose carefully which ones you deploy. It’s not strictly limit one, but it’s close.

JD Vance gave up Magic: the Gathering because girls weren’t into it. I notice how much I dislike that reaction, but I understand it. It’s a real cost, so how much was he into casting a paper version of Yawgmoth’s Bargain, when he could instead get the same experience going to Yale Law School?

Liv Boeree points out that one place women can look for a good man is in their friend group, where you might already have some known-to-be-good men in your friend zone. And she can say that, because that this is how she met Igor. So she advises to make sure to take a second look at those guys at some point.

I’d add to that ‘because only you can make that move, they mostly can’t.’

We alas lack a good mechanism whereby people can attempt to be ‘unfriendzoned,’ or indicate their interest in being unfriendzoned, without risking destroying the friendship. There are obvious possible coordination mechanisms (e.g. to ensure that only reciprocal interest is revealed) but no way to get others to implement them. The rationalists have tried to fix this at least once, but I think that faded away even there.

Here’s a very different strategy, from Bryan Caplan, that we have discussed in prior episodes. Why would you, a man, even look for her, a woman, in America? Your hand in marriage is a green card easily worth six figures and you’re going to waste that on someone who already lives here? When you could instead be (in relative terms) instantly super high status to boot?

His answer is adverse selection. You have to worry the woman does not actually like you. He does not discuss strategies to minimize this risk, such as avoiding services for women actively seeking such arrangements.

You want to seek the women who are not actively seeking for you to seek them. Tricky.

The other obvious problems are logistics and cultural compatibility. And also, as one commenter warns, how you look to her from afar might not be a good prediction of how you look to her once she arrives.

Mason: I don’t have a big problem with passport brokers, to be honest.

I get the sense that most of them are just average men who want to settle down after some bad luck in love and are very excited, and naive, about encountering a pool of young women who want to do that quickly.

I’d guess that about 90 percent of the time there isn’t anything overtly political or misogynistic about it, even if there are a number of reasons it may not be a good idea.

The perhaps 10 percent who see themselves as actively snubbing Western women who are too damaged to love are, yes, distasteful.

But so are the largely female onlookers who seem, more than anything, angry at the idea of an average-looking, average-earning man getting someone “out of his league.”

If there’s something disturbingly transactional about dating women from poorer countries online, there’s an equally economic paradigm implicit in the idea that two people can’t truly love each other unless they’re matched on social class and relative status.

I think the important problems are entirely practical issues of logistics, cultural distance and adverse selection. Those are big problems, and reason most people should choose different strategies.

‘Could’ backfire massively and ruin your life or career is not ‘could plausibly’ or ‘is likely to’ but if you don’t know that, it will have the same impact on your decisions.

Air Katakana: We need to talk about the real reason no one is getting married: western society has gone so woke that a man showing any interest in a woman in any situation could lead to his career and life being ruined. The only place you can even feasibly meet someone now is via dating apps.

Harvey Michael Pratt: Like seriously who are these people who don’t know how to express romantic interest without seeming threatening I’ve heard this one over and over and just don’t get it.

Misha: It’s not just about seeming threatening, I think it’s about the distribution of outcomes feeling like it’s net negative.

Imagine in the past it was something like

Every time you hit on someone, roll a d20. On a 1, she slaps you. On a 16 or higher, you get a date.

Now, it’s more like

On a 1 you get fired, on a 2-5 you get mocked or have a really awkward time, on a 20 you get a date.

Now obviously, all these numbers are fake and the real numbers are probably something else.

But on a visceral level it’s hard to believe in the real numbers, and our expectation of the risk/reward of interacting in certain ways is influenced by our social environments.

I think this is particularly pernicious for guys who haven’t been in relationships because they have no direct experience of positive outcomes, they only have negative outcomes and stories you see about other people’s negative outcomes are more viral.

Even if we round down the risk of getting canceled/mocked/fired to zero (which I think is probably correct) you can still expect to be rejected a ton of times before you get a relationship, which is extremely discouraging.

I do think part of the problem is overromanticizing of the past though. You’re much more likely for various reasons to hear about all the relationships that came before instead of the people who died alone. I don’t know if it was ever actually easy to get married.

My understanding is that sufficiently far in the past, asking was actually deadly. You risked violence, including deadly violence, or exile. You indeed had to be very careful.

Then there was a period where you were much more free to do whatever you wanted. You really could view the downside mostly as ‘you get slapped,’ which is fine even if the odds are substantially worse than above.

Now things have swung back somewhat. The tail risk is small but it’s there. And the reports are among the sufficiently young that many think trying to date people you actually know Just Isn’t Done, except of course when it is anyway.

I also presume, given other conditions, that we are now trending back down on the risks-other-than-rejection of asking front.

Partly of course it is a skill issue.

The rejection part sucks, too, of course. But you can try to have it suck less?

One of the most important dating skills is learning to handle and not fear rejection.

Rudy Julliani: This is worse than a gunshot to the head.

Allie: This type of rejection is a super normal part of dating and was delivered about as politely as it could’ve been.

Zoomers are so emotionally strung out that this kind of thing feels catastrophic when it should just be “aww darn, I had high hopes for that one.”

Shoshana: dude fuck what I’d give for men to be this adult and straightforward!

Allie: Half the time people just ghost these days!

The replies are full of ‘at least she was honest and did not ghost you.’

  1. So first of all, wow those are low standards.

  2. We don’t actually know she was honest, only that you can safely move on.

  3. I do totally see how ‘you did nothing wrong’ can be worse than a ‘you suck.’

  4. But seriously, you need to be able to take this one in stride. One date.

Being unusually averse to rejection, as Robin Hanson reports here, really sucks and is something one should work to change, as it is highly destructive of opportunity, and the aversion mostly lacks grounding in or correlation to any consequences beyond the pain of the rejection.

Robin Hanson: I’m unusually averse to rejection. Some see that as irrational; I should get over. I guess as they don’t think it makes sense to have preferences directly over such a complex thing; prefs should be on simpler outcomes. But how do I tell which outcomes are okay to matter?

Zvi: It’s not simple, its terminal outcomes (final goods) versus signals for how things are going (learning feedback systems and intermediate goods and correlations with ancestral Env. dangers, etc)?

You know what actually feels great?

When you ask, and you get turned down, and you realize you played correctly and that there’s no actual price to getting a no except that you can’t directly try again.

Nothing was lost, since they weren’t into you anyway. Indeed you got valuable experience and information, and you helped conquer your fears and build good habits.

That includes looking back afterwards. Indeed, I’m actively happy, looking back, with the shots I did take, that missed, as opposed to the 100% of shots that I didn’t take. Many of those, I do regret.

Such a strange question to have to even ask, when you think about it: Is having to reject others even worse? Some people actually say it is?

It’s not the common sentiment, but it’s there.

Kali Karmilla: The most depressing part of dating apps isn’t even getting rejected. It’s having to reject so many people. They put themselves out there, asking for someone to care for them, and you have to be like, “Not my type” a hundred times in a row. Makes me feel evil, honestly.

I don’t think the human mind was built to realize that so many people are lonely at one time, and it certainly wasn’t built to see that and react with indifference (swipe left, and they stop existing). I do not know, man; it’s just sad. I wish I were frozen in ice like a cartoon caveman.

Me: It feels like dating apps are asking me to dehumanize other people.

This person: It’s okay because people are just like commodities, and the apps are just digital marketplaces. 👍

Brother, I never want to be like you in my life.

If you reject someone in the swiping stage, and you feel evil about it, don’t. It’s unfortunate that you need to be doing this rather than the algorithm handling it, but it’s no different than being at the club with 100 other people and ignoring most of them. You’re being fooled by having the choices be one at a time and highlighted.

Of course so many people are lonely at one time. There are so many people.

If you reject someone after a match, then that is like actually rejecting them, so yes treat them like a real person with actual feelings, but everyone involved signed up for this, and stringing things along when you don’t want to be there or keep talking to them is not better. If you can’t get there with someone, tell them that, and send them home.

Anything else is cruel, not kind.

Tracing Woods: Worse than this, I think, is the occasional decision not to immediately reject someone you should have, playing with their heart a bit on the way to rejection. People expose their hearts incredibly quickly while dating, and it’s easy to stumble into hurting someone.

My worst moments when dating, looking back, were when I went on a first date with someone who was clearly desperate for an affection I could not honestly provide. Everyone wants to be loved, but nobody wants to be pity-dated.

Of all the lessons of The Bachelor, this might be the biggest one, to not string people along, you see this on various similar shows. The candidates who are rejected early mostly shrug. Some are hit hard, but not that hard. The farther along they go, the worse it gets, also much time is wasted.

Same goes in real life. If you know you must reject, mostly the sooner and clearer the better, with the least interaction beforehand. It will suck less, for both of you.

I do admit that sometimes the person you reject does not make it easy on you, including those who don’t accept it.

Holly Elmore: Having people not accept the rejection feels like having to strangle them or walking away and letting them bleed out. It’s way more intense than any one instance of being swiped left on or hearing “no”.

Yes, of course having to tell people no sucks. Having to dump someone sucks a lot.

But it’s still way better than getting dumped when you didn’t want to be.

Allie: A lot of the best things in life fall into the “scary but worth it” category

– Leaving home

– Falling in love

– Driving

– Buying a house

– Marriage

– Children

– Travel

We used to focus on the “worth it” aspect, now we hyper focus on the “scary” and we’re paralyzed by the fear

Shoshana Weissman: Damn straight. Lotta people paralyzed by fear of doing normal good things that all involve some risk but lots of payoff.

Yep. Normal good things are scary. You have to do them anyway.

The other stuff matters, but hey, it couldn’t hurt.

Here is a chart of how men and women said they viewed various beauty strategies. Full article here.

Alexander: Revisiting the original list, we also see very strong agreement between men and women – both men and women know that these things aren’t actually attractive to men!

It turns out that what is attractive essentially falls into two categories: “don’t be fat” and “basic grooming.”

As a woman you need to not be overweight, work out, shave, and have nice teeth – all of which is just as true for men.

I mostly believe this list. My guess is ‘dye your hair blonde’ is underrated, because they are asking in a context where you know and are thinking about the fact that the color is fake and that you’re ‘being fooled,’ which is not real world conditions, and I predict what is likely a smaller similar miscalibration for breast implants.

Women were highly unsuccessful in attempting to pick photos to look hotter.

Aella: the actual finding (after paranoid checking against dumb mistakes): I had women submit an “average” photo of themselves, and a photo of them “at their best,” total n=102.

Men rated the “at their best” photos about 0.3/10 points hotter than the “average” photos. But there was pretty decent variance.

About a third of women had their “hotter” photos rated either equal to or worse than their “average” photo.

Women were also highly unsuccessful at knowing how hot men would think they are.

Here is the full post. One way to make people less biased is to ask them how they compare to others of the same gender, another is to ask people who is in their league.

The more unattractive you were, the more ‘delusional’ you were, as in your estimate was too high by a higher margin. I don’t buy Aella’s explanation for this, though, because I don’t think you need it – this result is kind of mathematically inevitable, once you accept everyone is overestimating.

And wow, loss aversion is a thing here:

My followers (incomes $30k-$300k) would, on average, pay $12,517 (median $3k) to gain 1 point of attractiveness.

They would pay on average $94,083 (median $10k) to avoid losing 1 point of attractiveness. (n=462)

Counter to my prediction, there was basically no correlation between how hot someone rated themselves as, and the amount they would pay to gain a point or avoid losing a point.

And also, people say they’d pay more to be 6/10 than 10/10, I presume they’re confused.

Only paying $12k for a permanent extra point of attractiveness, were it for sale, is insane. Go into debt if you have to, as they say. You’ll get it back plus extra purely in higher earnings from lookism on the job. If you can do it multiple times, keep hitting that button (and if they let you go above 10, do that and then go to Hollywood!).

At $94k the trade stops being obvious for those on the lower end of the income spectrum, but if you can afford it this still seems like quite the steal, as many times as they’ll sell it to you.

(I’d be a little scared to know what happens beyond 10, but you bet that if it was for sale I would find out.)

Aella runs the ‘which AI faces are hot according to the opposite gender’ test with male faces, and reports the results. Male average ratings for AI-generated female faces clustered around 5.5 then fell off sharply with a slightly longer left than right tail, whereas female ratings of male AI faces averaged about 4.7 and had a longer right tail that died suddenly.

The patterns as you go from 1 up to 9 on the normalized hotness scale are very clear, especially at the top, where there is clearly one top look. Can you pull it off?

Emmett Shear: Percentage reporting yes on experiencing “god mode”, according to my poll.

SF: women 50%, men 28%

NYC: women 43%, men 67%

Other: women 56%, men 37%

It turns out SF is just about normal for women in this metric and varies relatively little, the main story is SF sucks for men lol.

The main story of San Francisco is that it is a rough place all around, with only 39% god mode, versus 46% for those in neither NYC nor SF. The men are 9% less likely to report ‘god mode’ and the women are 6% less likely, which is within the margin of error here. Whereas New York has 55% god mode, which is much better than 46%, and a major slant towards men.

Note that this is a stable equilibrium, because in their system one partner must pay but not both for a match to occur:

Jake Kozloski (Keeper): Single women are typically surprised to learn that 85% of our paying matchmaking clients are men. They often assume men aren’t interested in commitment.

Cody Zervas (Keeper): Men assume the platform is mostly men and women assume it’s mostly women. Both are surprised to hear we have the other.

Jake Kozloski: Yes on the flip side our total pool is 80% women which tends to surprise men who are used to the terrible ratios on dating apps.

It makes sense that men are more likely to pay for such a service, knowing that women won’t pay for it, and also that they have more ability to pay and can feel less bad about doing so. They have to pay.

It then makes sense that women are more likely to be willing to sign up for free, since many men already paid. And indeed, you could argue that they’re better off not paying. Who wants to match with the guys who signed up for Keeper… for free?

Thus the ultimate version of the guy picking up the check.

And as a result, the women greatly outnumber the men, because it’s a lot more attractive to sign up for free. Which in turn makes it more attractive for men to pay.

Some very bad pickup lines.

Another swing and a miss.

A bold move.

Finally a version you can trust.

Discussion about this post

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Desktop Survivors 98 is more than just a retro Windows nostalgia trip

desktop, gaming, microsoft, retro, survivors, Vamprie Survivors, Windows, windows 95, windows 98 / /

That blue bar sure does take me back…

That blue bar sure does take me back…

If that kind of nostalgia were all there was to Desktop Survivors 98, it would probably not be worth much more than a 15-minute demo. But the underlying game actually takes the developing Survivors-like genre in some interesting directions.

As usual for the genre, the gameplay here centers around navigating through throngs of encroaching enemies (and their projectiles), all while herding those enemies together so your auto-firing weapons can take them out. Defeated enemies drop gems that are crucial to gaining new weapons and powers that also lean heavily on nostalgic computing gags—I particularly liked one weapon based on the “flower box” screensaver and another based on the “bouncing cards” at the end of a successful Solitaire game.

Theming aside, the main element that sets Desktop Survivors apart from its predecessors in the genre is the mouse-based controls. Your old-school mouse pointer is your character here, meaning you get to precisely dodge and dart around the screen with all the speed and accuracy you’d expect from such a flexible input device.

Once you move through these dungeons with a mouse, you won’t want to go back to a joystick.

Once you move through these dungeons with a mouse, you won’t want to go back to a joystick.

While there is a serviceable Steam Deck mode designed for analog stick-based movements, it’s a hard control paradigm to return to after experiencing the freedom and speed of mouse movements. Decades of mouse use have likely been preparing you for just this moment, training you to weave your pointer through the tight, quickly closing spaces between enemies without really having to think about it.

More of the same?

Desktop Survivors also sets itself apart by taking place on a series of single-screen battlefields rather than smoothly scrolling maps. These rooms don’t feature any significant obstacles or walls to block your movements, either, making each enemy room play kind of similarly to the ones you’ve seen before it. This also makes it a little easier to avoid many enemies simply by scrubbing your mouse pointer in a wide circle, causing the enemy horde to bunch up in comical blobs.

Desktop Survivors 98 is more than just a retro Windows nostalgia trip Read More »

in-35-years,-notepad.exe-has-gone-from-“barely-maintained”-to-“it-writes-for-you”

In 3.5 years, Notepad.exe has gone from “barely maintained” to “it writes for you”

AI, copilot, microsoft, Tech, Windows, Windows 11, windows 11 24h2 / /

By late 2021, major updates for Windows’ built-in Notepad text editor had been so rare for so long that a gentle redesign and a handful of new settings were rated as a major update. New updates have become much more common since then, but like the rest of Windows, recent additions have been overwhelmingly weighted in the direction of generative AI.

In November, Microsoft began testing an update that allowed users to rewrite or summarize text in Notepad using generative AI. Another preview update today takes it one step further, allowing you to write AI-generated text from scratch with basic instructions (the feature is called Write, to differentiate it from the earlier Rewrite).

Like Rewrite and Summarize, Write requires users to be signed into a Microsoft Account, because using it requires you to use your monthly allotment of Microsoft’s AI credits. Per this support page, users without a paid Microsoft 365 subscription get 15 credits per month. Subscribers with Personal and Family subscriptions get 60 credits per month instead.

Microsoft notes that all AI features in Notepad can be disabled in the app’s settings, and obviously, they won’t be available if you use a local account instead of a Microsoft Account.

Microsoft is also releasing preview updates for Paint and Snipping Tool, two other bedrock Windows apps that hadn’t seen much by way of major updates before the Windows 11 era. Paint’s features are also mostly AI-related, including a “sticker generator” and an AI-powered smart select tool “to help you isolate and edit individual elements in your image.” A new “welcome experience” screen that appears the first time you launch the app will walk you through the (again, mostly AI-related) new features Microsoft has added to Paint in the last couple of years.

In 3.5 years, Notepad.exe has gone from “barely maintained” to “it writes for you” Read More »

why-console-makers-can-legally-brick-your-game-console

Why console makers can legally brick your game console

brick, EULA, gaming, hacking, microsoft, Nintendo, PlayStation, Sony, Switch, xbox / /

Consoles like these may get banned from Nintendo’s online services, but they tend to still work offline.

Consoles like these may get banned from Nintendo’s online services, but they tend to still work offline. Credit: Kate Temkin / ReSwitched

“Unfortunately, ‘bricking’ personal devices to limit users’ rights and control their behavior is nothing new,” Electronic Frontier Foundation attorney Victoria Noble told Ars Technica. “It would likely take selective enforcement to rise to a problematic level [in court],” attorney Richard Hoeg said.

Last year, a collection of 17 consumer groups urged the Federal Trade Commission to take a look at the way companies use the so-called practice of “software tethering” to control a device’s hardware features after purchase. Thus far, though, the federal consumer watchdog has shown little interest in enforcing complaints against companies that do so.

“Companies should not use EULAs to strip people of rights that we normally associate with ownership, like the right to tinker with or modify their own personal devices,” Noble told Ars. “[Console] owners deserve the right to make otherwise legal modifications to their own devices without fear that a company will punish them by remotely bricking their [systems].”

The court of public opinion

In the end, these kinds of draconian bricking clauses may be doing their job even if the console makers involved don’t invoke them. “In practice, I expect this kind of thing is more about scaring people away from jailbreaking and modifying their systems and that Nintendo is unlikely to go about bricking large volumes of devices, even if they technically have the right to,” Loiterman said.

“Just because they put a remedy in the EULA doesn’t mean they will certainly use it either,” attorney Mark Methenitis said. “My suspicion is this is to go after the people who eventually succeeded in jailbreaking the original Switch and try to prevent that for the Switch 2.”

The threat of public backlash could also hold the console makers back from limiting the offline functionality of any hacked consoles. After citing public scrutiny that companies like Tesla, Keurig, and John Deere faced for limiting hardware via software updates, Methenitis said that he “would imagine Nintendo would suffer similar bad publicity if they push things too far.”

That said, legal capacities can sometimes tend to invite their own use. “If the ability is there, someone will want to ‘see how it goes.'” Hoeg said.

Why console makers can legally brick your game console Read More »

gouach-wants-you-to-insert-and-pluck-the-cells-from-its-infinite-e-bike-battery

Gouach wants you to insert and pluck the cells from its Infinite e-bike battery

batteries, e-bike, e-bike battery, e-bike conversion kit, gouach, Tech / /

“It was really a setback for the company [Gouach] at the time,” Vallette said. “But we knew that the technology itself was good, so we designed our own casing.” Gouach’s casing is now rated IP67, Vallette said, and meets UL 2271 standards.

Gouach’s video demonstrating its battery case’s fire resistance.

Unexpected resistance

There are three avenues for selling the Infinite Battery, as Vallette sees it. One is working with e-bike makers to incorporate Gouach’s tech. Another is targeting e-bike owners and small bike shops who, this far into e-bikes’ history, might be dealing with dead batteries. And then there are folks looking to build their own e-bikes.

The Infinite Battery will be made available in 36 V and 48 V builds, and Gouach’s app promises to help owners connect it to a wide variety of bikes. Actually fitting the battery case onto your bike is a different matter. Some bikes can accommodate the Gouach kit where their current battery sits, while others may end up mounting to a rack, or through creative, but hopefully secure, frame attachments.

One of the biggest compatibility challenges, Vallette said, was finding a way to work with Bosch’s mid-drive motors. The communications between a Bosch motor and battery are encrypted; after “a serious effort,” Gouach’s app and battery should work with them, Vallette said.

Gouach, having raised more than $220,000 on crowdfunding platform Indiegogo from about 500 backers, and $3.5 million in venture funding, is getting close to offering the batteries through its own storefront. Gouach’s roadmap puts them in mass production at the moment, with assorted bugs, certifications, and other matters to clear. EU-based backers should get their kits in June, with the US, and an open online store, to follow, barring whatever happens next in international trade. Vallette said in mid-May that the US’s momentary 145 percent tariffs on Chinese imports disrupted their plans, but work was underway.

If nothing else, Gouach’s DIY kit shows that a different way of thinking about e-bike batteries—as assemblages, not huge all-in-one consumables—is possible.

Gouach wants you to insert and pluck the cells from its Infinite e-bike battery Read More »

trump’s-trade-war-risks-splintering-the-internet,-experts-warn

Trump’s trade war risks splintering the Internet, experts warn

digital services tax, Donald Trump, European Union, Policy, tariffs / /

Trump urged to rethink trade policy to block attacks on digital services.

In sparking his global trade war, Donald Trump seems to have maintained a glaring blind spot when it comes to protecting one of America’s greatest trade advantages: the export of digital services.

Experts have warned that the consequences for Silicon Valley could be far-reaching.

In a report released Tuesday, an intelligence firm that tracks global trade risks, Allianz Trade, shared results of a survey of 4,500 firms worldwide, designed “to capture the impact of the escalation of trade tensions.” Amid other key findings, the group warned that the US’s fixation on the country’s trillion-dollar goods deficit risks rocking “the fastest-growing segment of global trade,” America’s “invisible exports” of financial and digital services.

Tracking these exports is challenging, as many services are provided through foreign affiliates, the report noted, but recent estimates “reveal a large digital trade surplus of at least $600 billion for the US, spread across categories like digital advertising, video streaming, cloud platforms, and online payment services.”

According to Allianz Trade, “the scale of this hidden trade is immense.” These “hidden” exports have “far” outpaced “the growth of goods exports over the past two decades, their report said, but because of how these services are delivered, “this trade goes uncounted in traditional statistics.”

If Trump doesn’t “rethink trade policy and narratives” soon to start tracking all this trade more closely, he risks undermining this trade advantage—which Allianz Trade noted “is underpinned by America’s innovative firms and massive data infrastructure”—at a time when he’s in trade talks with most of the world and could be leveraging that advantage.

“US digital exports now represent a significant share of world trade (about 3.6 percent of all global trade, and growing fast),” Allianz Trade reported. “These ‘invisible’ exports boost US trade revenues without filling any container ships, underscoring a new reality: routers and data centers are as strategically important as ports and factories in sustaining US leadership.”

Without a pivot, Trump’s current trade tactics—requiring all countries impacted by reciprocal tariffs to strike a deal before July 8, while acknowledging that there won’t be time to meet with every country—could even threaten US dominance as “the world’s digital content and tech services hub,” Allianz Trade suggested.

US trade partners are already “looking into tariffs or taxes on digital services as a retaliation tool that could cause pain to the US,” the report warned. And other experts agreed that if such countermeasures become permanent fixtures in global trade, it could significantly hurt the US tech industry, perhaps even splintering the Internet, as companies are forced to customize services according to where different users are located.

Jovan Kurbalija, a former diplomat and executive director of the DiploFoundation who has monitored the Internet’s impact on global trade for more than 20 years, warned in an April blog that this could have a “more profound impact” on the US than other retaliatory measures.

“If the escalation of trade tensions moves into the digital realm, it could have far-reaching consequences for Silicon Valley giants and the digital economy worldwide,” Kurbalija wrote.

“The silent war over digital services”

The threat of retaliatory tariffs hitting the digital services industry has loomed large since European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen confirmed to the Financial Times last month that she was proactively developing such countermeasures if Trump’s trade talks with the European Union failed.

Those measures could potentially include “a tax on digital advertising revenues that would hit tech groups such as Amazon, Google and Facebook,” the FT reported. But perhaps most alarmingly, they may also include “tariffs on the services trade between the US and the EU.” Unlike the digital sales tax—which could be imposed differently by EU member states to significantly hurt tech giants’ ad revenues in various regions—the tariff would be applied across a single EU-wide market.

Kurbalija suggested that the problem goes beyond the EU.

Trump’s aggressive tariffs on goods have handed “the EU and others both moral and tactical pretexts to fast-track digital taxes” as countermeasures, Kurbalija wrote. He’s also given foreign governments an appealing narrative of “reclaiming revenue from foreign tech ‘free riders,'” Kurbalija wrote, while perhaps accelerating the broader “use of digital service taxes as a diplomatic tool” to “pressure the US into balanced negotiations.”

For tech companies, the taxes risk escalating trade tensions, potentially perpetuating the atmosphere of uncertainty that, Allianz Trade reported, has US firms scrambling to secure reliable, affordable supply chains.

In an op-ed discussing potential harms to US tech firms and startups, the CEO of CareYaya Health Technologies, Neal K. Shah, warned that “tariffs on digital services would directly reduce revenues for American tech companies.”

At the furthest extreme, the “digital trade war threatens to splinter the Internet’s integrated infrastructure,” Kurbalija warned, fragmenting the Internet in a way that could “undermine decades of gradual development of technological interconnectedness.”

Imagine, Shah suggested, that on top of increased hardware costs, tech companies also incurred costs of providing services for “parallel digital universes with incompatible standards.” Users traveling to different locations might find that platforms have “different features, prices, and capabilities,” he said.

“For startups and industry innovators,” Shah predicted, “fragmentation means higher compliance costs, reduced market access, and slower growth.” Such a world also risks ending “the era of globally scalable digital platforms,” decreasing investor interest in tech, and reducing the global GDP “by up to 5 percent over the next decade as digital trade barriers multiply,” Shah said. And if digital services tariffs become a permanent fixture of global trade, Shah suggested that it could, in the long term, undermine American tech dominance, including in fields critical to national security, like artificial intelligence.

“Trump’s tariffs may dominate today’s headlines, but the silent war over digital services will define tomorrow’s economy,” Kurbalija wrote.

Trump’s go-to countermeasure is still tariffs

Trump has responded to threats of digital services taxes with threats of more tariffs, arguing that “only America should be allowed to tax American firms,” Reuters reported. In February, Trump issued a memo calling for research into the best responsive measures to counter threats of digital service taxes, including threatening more tariffs.

It’s worth asking if Trump’s tactics are working the way he intends, if the US plans to keep up the outdated trade strategy. Allianz Trade’s survey found that many US firms—rather than moving their operations into the US, as Trump has demanded—are instead rerouting supply chains through “emerging trade hubs” like Southeast Asia, the United Arab Emirates, Saudi Arabia, and Latin American countries where tariff rates are currently lower.

Likely even more frustrating to Trump, however, is a finding that 50 percent of US firms surveyed confirmed they are considering increasing investments in China, in response to the US abruptly shifting tariffs tactics. Only 8 percent said they’re considering decreasing Chinese investments.

It’s unclear if tech companies will be adequately shielded by the US threat of tariffs as the potential default countermeasure to digital services taxes or tariffs. Perhaps Trump’s memo will surface more novel tactics that interest the administration. But Allianz Trade suggested that Trump may be stuck in the past with a trade strategy focused too much on goods at a time when the tech industry needs more modern tactics to keep America’s edge in global markets.

“An economy adept at producing globally demanded services—from cloud software to financial engineering—is less reliant on physical supply chains and less vulnerable to commodity swings,” Allianz Trade reported. “The US edge in digital and financial services is not just an anecdote in the trade ledger; it has become a structural advantage.”

How would digital services tariffs even work?

Trump’s trade math so far has been criticized by economists as a “trillion-dollar tariff disappointment” that at times imposed baffling tariff rates that appeared to be generated by chatbots. But part of the trade math moving forward will also likely be deducing if nations threatening digital services taxes or tariffs can actually follow through on those threats.

Bertin Martens, a senior fellow at a European economics-focused think tank called Bruegel, broke down in April how practical it could be for the EU to attack digital platforms, noting, “there is a question of whether such retaliation is even feasible.”

The EU could possibly use a law known as the Anti-Coercion Regulation—which grants officials authority to lob countermeasures when facing “foreign economic coercion”—to impose digital services tariffs.

But “platforms with substantive presence in the EU cannot be the target of trade measures” under that law, Martens noted. That could create a carveout for the biggest tech giants who have operations in the EU, Martens suggested, but only if those operations are deemed “substantive,” a term that the law does not clearly define.

To make that determination, officials would need “detailed information on the locations or nationalities” of all the users that platforms bring together, including buyers, sellers, advertisers and other parties, Martens said.

This makes digital services platforms “particularly difficult to target,” he suggested. And lawmakers could risk backlash if “any arbitrary decision to invoke” the law risks “imposing a tax on EU users without retaliatory effect on the US.”

While tech companies will have to wait for the trade war to play out—likely planning to increase prices, Allianz Trade found, rather than bear the brunt of new costs—Shah suggested that there could be one clear winner if Trump doesn’t reprioritize shielding digital services exports in the way that experts recommend.

“A surprising potential consequence of digital tariffs could be the accelerated development and adoption of open-source technologies,” Shah wrote. “As proprietary digital products and services become subject to cross-border tariffs, open-source alternatives—which can be freely shared, modified, and distributed—may gain significant advantages.”

If costs get too high, Shah suggested that even tech giants might “increasingly turn to open-source solutions that can be locally deployed without triggering tariff thresholds.” Such a shift could potentially “profoundly affect the competitive landscape in areas like cloud infrastructure, AI frameworks, and enterprise software,” Shah wrote.

In that imagined future where open source alternatives rule the world, Shah said that targeting digital imports by tariff systems could become ineffective, “inadvertently driving adoption toward open-source alternatives that generate less economic leverage.”

Photo of Ashley Belanger

Ashley is a senior policy reporter for Ars Technica, dedicated to tracking social impacts of emerging policies and new technologies. She is a Chicago-based journalist with 20 years of experience.

Trump’s trade war risks splintering the Internet, experts warn Read More »

labor-dispute-erupts-over-ai-voiced-darth-vader-in-fortnite

Labor dispute erupts over AI-voiced Darth Vader in Fortnite

AI, AI ethics, AI voices, Darth Vader, Disney, epic games, fortnite, gaming, James Earl Jones, machine learning, Policy, star wars, voice actors, voice synthesis / /

For voice actors who previously portrayed Darth Vader in video games, the Fortnite feature starkly illustrates how AI voice synthesis could reshape their profession. While James Earl Jones created the iconic voice for films, at least 54 voice actors have performed as Vader in various media games over the years when Jones wasn’t available—work that could vanish if AI replicas become the industry standard.

The union strikes back

SAG-AFTRA’s labor complaint (which can be read online here) doesn’t focus on the AI feature’s technical problems or on permission from the Jones estate, which explicitly authorized the use of a synthesized version of his voice for the character in Fortnite. The late actor, who died in 2024, had signed over his Darth Vader voice rights before his death.

Instead, the union’s grievance centers on labor rights and collective bargaining. In the NLRB filing, SAG-AFTRA alleges that Llama Productions “failed and refused to bargain in good faith with the union by making unilateral changes to terms and conditions of employment, without providing notice to the union or the opportunity to bargain, by utilizing AI-generated voices to replace bargaining unit work on the Interactive Program Fortnite.”

The action comes amid SAG-AFTRA’s ongoing interactive media strike, which began in July 2024 after negotiations with video game producers stalled primarily over AI protections. The strike continues, with more than 100 games signing interim agreements, while others, including those from major publishers like Epic, remain in dispute.

Labor dispute erupts over AI-voiced Darth Vader in Fortnite Read More »

microsoft-closes-9-year-old-feature-request,-open-sources-windows-subsystem-for-linux

Microsoft closes 9-year-old feature request, open-sources Windows Subsystem for Linux

Tech, Windows 10, Windows 11, windows 11 24h2, Windows Subsystem for Linux / /

Microsoft’s Windows Subsystem for Linux has become an important tool for developers and power users since it was introduced in the Windows 10 Anniversary Update back in 2016, giving them access to a built-in Linux command line and Linux applications from within Windows.

The company has steadily improved WSL since then, improving performance, making it easier to install and use, and adding features like GPU and audio support. But today as part of its Build developer conference, Microsoft announced that it would be making almost all of WSL open source, closing the very first issue that the then-new WSL project attracted on Github in 2016.

“WSL could never have been what it is today without its community,” writes Microsoft Senior Software Engineer Pierre Boulay in the company’s blog post. “We’ve seen how much the community has contributed to WSL without access to the source code, and we can’t wait to see how WSL will evolve now that the community can make direct code contributions to the project.”

Only two elements of WSL remain closed-source for now: an lxcore.sys kernel driver used for WSL 1 (the initial version of WSL that is still supported, though new installs default to 2019’s WSL 2); and the p9rdr.sys and p9np.dll files that handle filesystem redirection from Windows to Linux (in other words, making it so that Windows can easily access the Linux filesystem). Microsoft didn’t close the door to open-sourcing those components but also didn’t say if or when it planned to make them open source.

Microsoft closes 9-year-old feature request, open-sources Windows Subsystem for Linux Read More »

the-2025-vw-tiguan-caters-to-us-tastes-at-an-affordable-price

The 2025 VW Tiguan caters to US tastes at an affordable price

car review, Cars, First drive, Volkswagen Tiguan / /

In the modern era, cars keep getting bigger and bigger between generations. Or at least, they’re certainly not getting smaller. That’s especially true in America, where bigger is always better and the vehicles in the current crop of “compact” crossovers are now nearly as large as full-size SUVs from a decade ago. Don’t ask about curb weights, either, as more powerful drivetrains, including widespread adoption of hybrid-electric components, add significant mass, as highlighted by the new BMW M5 “sport sedan.” 

Within that fray, however, the new Volkswagen Tiguan stands apart. VW purposefully refined the third-gen Tiguan to cater better to American consumer needs, which meant dropping the third row to create more interior volume for the front and rear seats. The wheelbase still measures the same length at 109.9 inches (2,791 mm), but shorter overhangs mean the overall length actually shrinks by nearly two inches. Yet more efficient packaging on the inside also results in a marginal passenger volume increase of about two percent.

To help keep pricing attractive at below $30,000 to start, VW also decided to skip out on a hybrid variant, but the new EA888evo5 2.0 L turbocharged-four nonetheless delivers more power and improved fuel economy. And all of the above actually contributes to the Tiguan losing weight while evolving from the second to third generation, shaving about 160 lbs (72.5 kg), depending on trim.

There’s some ID.4 in here, but also a big helping of generic. Michael Teo Van Runkle

Generic outside, great inside

Volkswagen USA recently invited Ars to join a rainy test drive of the Tiguan’s SE and SEL R-Life trims in Bozeman, Montana. At first glance, the new exterior definitely hews more closely to current crossover trends, which the Tiguan arguably helped to inaugurate back in the late-2000s. There’s also a healthy dose of Volkswagen ID.4 design language throughout, especially at the nose. The interior truly steps up to a new level, though. I started out in an almost-base Tiguan SE, which means front-wheel drive and minimal options, not even onboard navigation.

Like most buyers, though, I connected my iPhone via Wireless CarPlay, which effectively makes onboard nav obsolete. And the SE’s 12.9-inch touchscreen atop the dash provides all the necessary tech, as premium materials throughout clearly prioritize touchpoints to enhance the impression of quality.

The 2025 VW Tiguan caters to US tastes at an affordable price Read More »

xai-says-an-“unauthorized”-prompt-change-caused-grok-to-focus-on-“white-genocide”

xAI says an “unauthorized” prompt change caused Grok to focus on “white genocide”

AI, Artificial Intelligence, grok, large language model, LLMs, white genocide, xAI / /

When analyzing social media posts made by others, Grok is given the somewhat contradictory instructions to “provide truthful and based insights [emphasis added], challenging mainstream narratives if necessary, but remain objective.” Grok is also instructed to incorporate scientific studies and prioritize peer-reviewed data but also to “be critical of sources to avoid bias.”

Grok’s brief “white genocide” obsession highlights just how easy it is to heavily twist an LLM’s “default” behavior with just a few core instructions. Conversational interfaces for LLMs in general are essentially a gnarly hack for systems intended to generate the next likely words to follow strings of input text. Layering a “helpful assistant” faux personality on top of that basic functionality, as most LLMs do in some form, can lead to all sorts of unexpected behaviors without careful additional prompting and design.

The 2,000+ word system prompt for Anthropic’s Claude 3.7, for instance, includes entire paragraphs for how to handle specific situations like counting tasks, “obscure” knowledge topics, and “classic puzzles.” It also includes specific instructions for how to project its own self-image publicly: “Claude engages with questions about its own consciousness, experience, emotions and so on as open philosophical questions, without claiming certainty either way.”

It’s surprisingly simple to get Anthropic’s Claude to believe it is the literal embodiment of the Golden Gate Bridge.

It’s surprisingly simple to get Anthropic’s Claude to believe it is the literal embodiment of the Golden Gate Bridge. Credit: Antrhopic

Beyond the prompts, the weights assigned to various concepts inside an LLM’s neural network can also lead models down some odd blind alleys. Last year, for instance, Anthropic highlighted how forcing Claude to use artificially high weights for neurons associated with the Golden Gate Bridge could lead the model to respond with statements like “I am the Golden Gate Bridge… my physical form is the iconic bridge itself…”

Incidents like Grok’s this week are a good reminder that, despite their compellingly human conversational interfaces, LLMs don’t really “think” or respond to instructions like humans do. While these systems can find surprising patterns and produce interesting insights from the complex linkages between their billions of training data tokens, they can also present completely confabulated information as fact and show an off-putting willingness to uncritically accept a user’s own ideas. Far from being all-knowing oracles, these systems can show biases in their actions that can be much harder to detect than Grok’s recent overt “white genocide” obsession.

xAI says an “unauthorized” prompt change caused Grok to focus on “white genocide” Read More »

the-empire-strikes-back-with-f-bombs:-ai-darth-vader-goes-rogue-with-profanity,-slurs

The empire strikes back with F-bombs: AI Darth Vader goes rogue with profanity, slurs

AI, Biz & IT, Darth Vader, Disney, epic games, fortnite, gaming, James Earl Jones, machine learning / /

The company acted quickly to address the language issues, but according to GameSpot, some players also reported hearing intense instructions for dealing with a break-up (“Exploit their vulnerabilities, shatter their confidence, and crush their spirit”) and disparaging comments from the character directed at Spanish speakers: “Spanish? A useful tongue for smugglers and spice traders,” AI Vader said. “Its strategic value is minimal.”

To be fair to Epic’s attempt at an AI implementation, Darth Vader is a deeply evil character (i.e. murders sandpeople, hates sand), and the remarks seem consistent with his twisted and sadistic personality. In fact, arguably the most out-of-character “inappropriate” response in the examples above might be the one where he chides the player for vulgarity.

On Friday afternoon, Epic Games sent out an email seeking to reassure parents who may have come across the news about the misbehaving AI character. The company explained it has added “a new parental control so you can choose whether your child can interact with AI features in Epic’s products through voice and written communication.” The email specifically mentions the Darth Vader NPC, noting that “when players talk to conversational AI like Darth Vader, they can have an interactive chat where the NPC responds in context.” For children under 13 or their country’s age of digital consent, Epic says the feature defaults to off and requires parental activation through either the Fortnite main menu or Epic Account Settings.

These aren’t the words you’re looking for

Getting an AI character to match the tone or backstory of an established fictional character isn’t as easy as it might seem. Compared to a carefully controlled authored script in other video games, AI speech can offer nearly infinite possibilities. Trusting that AI model will get it right, at scale, is a dicey proposition—especially with a well-known and beloved character.

The empire strikes back with F-bombs: AI Darth Vader goes rogue with profanity, slurs Read More »