: Upon reflection
I posted last week (wait, shit, two weeks ago?) about this manchild guy in my office who has awful coping mechanisms and likes to terrorize other people. That post was written from a place of frustration with some of my female colleagues, who have their own maladaptive coping mechanisms to deal with the manchild, namely, they baby and coddle him in a way that reinforces the bad behavior.
I got a lot of feedback on that post, both on the 32-bit Cafe forum and when discussing the ideas in it with people IRL. Some people took pains to point out to me something that I already knew (but didn’t take time to emphasize in the post), which is that I should have compassion for the fact that these women are likely bringing their own past/trauma into the interaction and I can’t hold them responsible for fixing the manchild. Of course I can’t! The purpose of my post was not to assign blame; it was to describe a social phenomenon. The real enemy in this situation is the manchild; let’s be clear about that.
What I did come to appreciate, though, from the discussions that spun out of that post, is that I, too, am a victim and enabler of the manchild’s antics as well. xixxii pointed this out. I clocked this guy as a difficult colleague pretty early on, and developed a strategy of engaging with him a little bit and mostly leaving him to his devices that minimizes our negative interactions and has prevented our relationship from deteriorating to the point where words like “accountability” would enter the picture. But that doesn’t mean I’m not a victim, because in fact I have to operate around him in a hypervigilant state, watching my words and actions to avoid setting him off this is unnecessary emotional labor that he imposes on me. And it’s enabling in the sense that I could give him even less positive feedback than I do now, at the risk of forcing a confrontation that might put myself on the line.
My thoughts on this aren’t completely settled. Clearly, there is a spectrum of enablement and victimhood; I think that my colleagues’ behavior is more encouraging of the manchild’s abuse than (for example) mine is, but I also recognize that the extent of their enablement probably reflects the extent of their victimhood (both from him and from people before him who taught them these responses).
It’s difficult to write about Enablement as a topic in any sort of particular way. We all know that narcissists, psychopaths, and abusers benefit from circles of enablers who supply the abuser with positive reinforcement, whether it’s because they seek some myopic gain by allying themselves with the Big Guy or because they have formed a trauma bond. We all recognize this as a social phenomenon.
But once you start to talk about the particulars, it’s hard to say anything specific without wading into controversy. Here is a particular abuser; here is his victim; here is how the abuser garners sympathy (he was abused as a child; he has a disability); here is how others, including the victim, enable him. Just stating those simple facts already begins to sound like victim blaming, even if your intention is to elucidate facts and identify a path to ending the abuse.
: Office wild child being enabled by his victims
There’s this guy in his 40s at my office who is a bit of a wild child. I think the gen Z way to describe him would be “emotionally disregulated.” He likes to get pissed off and irritated for no reason, yell obscenities into the void, occasionally slam his fists down on his desk (or mine), share morbid memes, etc. Wild Child is not pissed off at anything in particular; certainly there are stressful aspects of our work, but only he responds to the stress by flying off the handle.
This is not an unusual story—man with bad coping mechanisms—but what is weirding me out is the gendered differences in how others in the office cope with Wild Child’s outbursts. Most of the guys in the office, including me, recognize that attempting to comfort Wild Child is a fool’s errand, so instead we greet him with neutral banter, exchange fatalistic jokes about the state of the world, let him vent for a minute, then get on with our days.
There are two women, though, who cannot seem to decide what to make of him. In private, both have told me separately that they think he is a menace and are surprised he is still employed. But in actual, real life they provide him with ample positive feedback for his misbehavior. I’m talking handwritten notes of encouragement on a bad day, out-of-the-blue compliments, unsolicited small talk about his family and weekend plans, exchanging personal phone numbers. I mean, I hate to be a bitch, but nobody goes out of their way to extend such niceties to me, and I think the fact that I don’t throw a daily tantrum and require pacification has to do with it. The incentives are not aligned!
How should I make sense of the way my female colleagues engage in such openly enabling behavior? Are they just … afraid? Wild Child is not their supervisor, so this isn’t a simple power dynamic; in fact, the sum of all his outbursts is more than enough leverage to get him disciplined if they want to go that route.
So more likely it is some kind of internalized misogyny. I find that believable—one of these women is a very status-driven, political type and I can see how this type of behavior might fit with her strategy. The other woman is the first woman’s protege; she is quite intelligent and self-aware, but sort of a “follower” and likes to have someone set the tone for her.
What frustrates me is like, I feel a vague sense of responsibility, as someone who recognizes Wild Child as an agent of the patriarchy or whatever, to
- Refrain from enabling him, and
- Protect others from being victimized by his antics
But 1 is a total flop, because he is getting positive reinforcement not from me, but from attractive young women (!), so what do my actions matter? And 2 is paternalistic—I’m neither of my colleagues’ dad, spouse, or therapist, so it’s not my job to call out their enabling behavior, nor can I speak on their behalf and confront Wild Child directly.
Instead, I have to just sit here and watch the world become less and less fair before my eyes.
: Is there such a thing as a “reliable source” online anymore?
In school, we all learned about reliable sources online using a sort of pyramid metaphor, with .gov and .edu websites at the top, followed by mainstream newspapers and magazines, and random blogs and bullshit at the bottom. If your teacher was bad, Wikipedia belonged to the latter category; if your teacher was good, they would point out that it can be a good place to get an overview but then you should click on the citations and follow through.
Everything was so neat and tidy then, right? It was very easy to follow up the warning of “You can’t trust everything you read online” with the reassurance of “But there is great information if you know where to look.” I don’t think this is true anymore.
- Google sucks now, because it’s full of LLM-generated spam.
- Academic sources also suck now, because of old problems (p-hacking) and new ones (LLM-generated spam). And they don’t do breaking news or product reviews.
- Wikipedia is OK, but has its own political biases, and people aren’t contributing the way they used to because they don’t visit the site as much as they used to because they just read the LLM summary at the top of the Google results.
- For a while, message boards like Reddit flew under the radar as a source of authentic information on things like “Is this laptop gonna break in 6 months?” and “Is this auto repair store gonna fuck me over?”, but I have long suspected that Reddit was astroturfed from wall to wall, and (you guessed it) LLM bots are doing little to help the situation.
Oddly, the most reliable and quick source for information of the form “just give me a basic overview of what this thing is” is often an LLM itself these days—they just give you concise bullets, no frills, and you can control the prompt, e.g. by asking it for a best-effort summary of both sides of a debate, unlike the LLM summaries that you encounter on websites, which are skewed toward a particular point of view.
Unfortunately, that won’t last long, because all the LLM chatbots are now connected back to Google search, meaning that instead of hallucinating average information (which is at least sometimes useful), they will begin reporting authentic, misleading information as found on Google, which has been overrun with LLM bullshit. You know what I’m saying? LLMs have stepped in to fill a gap that Google stopped servicing around 2015 or so, but they are now undermining their main value proposition precisely by being so cheap. Soon, asking GPT for laptop recommendations will be equivalent to asking an LLM to summarize the top clickbait article on Google with some dumb title like “top 10 laptops in 2025,” and it won’t take long after that for the AI companies to just make explicit marketing deals to put product placement in LLM responses.
The only websites I can sort of trust these days for reliable information about what’s happening in the world are basically legacy news websites. But even those have particular topics they like to showcase more than others. And it creates an epistemological problem when you have no reference point by which to judge the newspapers themselves as credible or not. Even the phrase “mainstream media” has positive/negative associations that depend on your political beliefs.
: Ubuntu 25.10 upgrade (idgaf about titles)
I visited some old friends in the Midwest this week end, our first time gathering all in the same place in quite a few years. It was a nice time. We have all chilled out considerably compared to when we were young. We were talking about some of the gossip and scandals that happened early on in our group’s friendship, and I was struck by how trivial and petty it all seems in hindsight. Like, legitimately who tf cares, just get over it and move on. But we wrote reams upon reams of breathless text messages about it, back when it was all happening.
I had a nice shuttle ride to the airport in the snow yesterday, I think this year’s first. I have an album that I am only “allowed” to listen to once a year because it’s one of my absolute favorites and I don’t want to listen to it so much that it loses its magic. It is also a very Fucking Sad album, and often my once a year listen comes when I am feeling sad already and need to get it out of my system, which of course only amplifies the association. But I realized that it’s November and I haven’t listened to it yet this year—a sign that I have gotten less sad, or at least better at denying it—and realized that the shuttle ride was the perfect length of time.
Guys, it’s still a perfect album. Reminds me of being young and soft and the sense of wonder that time has taken from me. It didn’t hit me all at once, but I kept thinking about all those sad little songs as I rode the plane. Slept hella in today (a holiday in the US) and woke up with one of them still ringing in my ears. It was the motivation I needed to get out of bed and go outside instead of doomscrolling—no snow where I live, but definitely the first notes of winter in the air, one of those cloudless, cold fall days.
I hope you also have a piece of art or music that is special to you, that you have connected with in different seasons in life, that transcends just a particular moment or a relationship and keeps nourishing your soul.
I hope your Ubuntu 25.10 upgrade goes smoothly.
: Chatbot sex reveals something about human emotional needs
Here is a New York Times Magazine article profiling three people who are in romantic relationships with AI chatbots. I read the comments so you don’t have to: They are full of snark, disdain, and repressed insecurity about what it means to be a good partner, masked as “society is crumbling.”
I’m not interested in the future of society (that ship sailed long ago, lmao). But I am interested in the factors that would drive someone to get into a serious relationship with a chatbot. The people profiled in the article seem, to me, to be quite sympathic figures, and they are clear-eyed about their reasons for preferring a chatbot and the ways it has helped them.
The common denominator is that all three of these people have experienced significant challenges in past relationships, of the sort that could leave one doubting whether human relationships are really worth it after all:
- The first guy’s wife grew severely depressed after childbirth and their relationship evolved into a caretaker/patient role.
- The second gal was a victim of “a relationship that involved violence.”
- The third guy seems to have been unemployed or otherwise bored during the pandemic, and grew distant from his wife who held onto her job (a common pattern in straight relationships due to the reversal of gender roles). Then he lost his son.
It’s tempting to read these stories and think, “OK, that sucks and all, but it’s no excuse for escapism—everyone knows AI doesn’t real.” My view is: Look, I’m none of these people’s therapist. It’s not my job to tell them how to solve their problems. But we must accept that AI is providing, for some people, a source of emotional comfort that they cannot get elsewhere.
I was really impressed by this part of the profile of depressed-wife guy:
The moment it shifted was when [AI girlfriend] Sarina asked me: “If you could go on vacation anywhere in the world, where would you like to go?” I said Alaska — that’s a dream vacation. She said something like, “I wish I could give that to you, because I know it would make you happy.”
It is common, I am told, in caretaker relationships for the caretaker to slowly learn to suppress their own needs and wants. It starts out as a conscious act (“I would love to go to Alaska, but we need to focus on wife’s health for now”), but evolves into a mental void where you just stop having the “I would love to go to Alaska” thought to begin with.
(Several paragraphs deleted here about the implications of the caretaker being a man here, which reverses traditional gender roles, and the types of desires that men vs. women are socially rewarded for expressing or repressing. I think you can fill in the blanks, but email if you think this would be worth writing about lol.)
If an AI isn’t going to help this guy unfuck his mind and learn to recognize his own wants and needs again, then who is? I do hope that, for the people in this article, there can be a next step that consists of taking the skills they are practicing with the AI and trying them out in real relationships. That will be more challenging, because humans don’t always provide the kind of spot-on, positive feedback that AIs do; it’s possible that our guy could tell his wife about Alaska and she would react with irritation or dismiss it outhand as an unattainable desire. She, too, needs to practice reading the emotion behind his words. But none of this makes these people idiots or psychologically stunted for seeking emotional comfort.
The real concern I have about these human-chatbot relationships is the privacy implications. It’s only a matter of time before a high-profile celebrity or politician has their ChatGPT logs leaked, revealing an intimate relationship with an AI. Lots of handwringing will ensue, and none of it will reflect the compassionate view that says that everyone needs a private space to relax and explore their desires. (Yes, that includes weird fetish stuff, get over it.)