Credit to original comic for the inspiration: @system32comics

Dessa is a full-duplex speech-to-speech model that you can run on consumer GPUs.

This is a GPT3 moment for speech.

Disclosure: ChatGPT wrote most of this (80ish%) because I’m too lazy to construct the words myself. I asked it to pull together our conversations about this and organize them into a post.

My son is 20, has ADHD, and moved out about two months ago. He works and lives independently, but getting started on overwhelming tasks can be difficult.

One example:

The bedroom he left behind looked like a disaster bomb had exploded in it. He needed to finish clearing it out and cleaning it, but couldn’t get over the hump of starting.

I used ChatGPT to help design an executive function coaching system he could use through his own Plus subscription.

We kept it simple:
1) one main chat for schedule management, email management, goals and check-ins
2) dedicated Projects for bigger tasks so that context would be retained over time. (Register for college, design a video game, prep my living space for a kitten, clean my room, etc)

The instructions tell ChatGPT to ask one question at a time, consider his actual schedule, and give him one manageable next action with a clear endpoint.

He can also ask it something as open ended as “I’m having trouble getting started with my day, review my goals and projects and give me a first step.”

For the bedroom, I had him take a video of the room and ask ChatGPT for help in a dedicated Project. Showing the mess meant he didn’t first have to figure out how to describe and organize it.

One prompt we gave him was: “Help me make a room-cleaning plan with three small steps and breaks. Ask one question at a time, and help me pick a first step that takes five minutes or less.”

He worked with ChatGPT and created a plan with a completion date, time around his work schedule, and specific stages for sorting, packing, cleaning, and moving furniture.

The instructions also cover getting stuck: help identify the obstacle, make the step smaller, and restart after a missed day without piling on extra work.

The final step: I added humorous, automated email nudges from my own assistant, Goose, until his ChatGPT emailed me back and confirmed he’d made the plan, and explained it. Apparently my parenting toolkit now includes an artificial goose with a clipboard.

It’s still early, but so far it’s working extremely well. He has a concrete plan and somewhere to go for help figuring out the next step when the whole job feels overwhelming.

He has started to use it, on his own, to plan, research, and move forward his own goals. The excuses about not having time have completely stopped, he tells me in advance when will be working on his room, what the outcome will be, and then he executes.

I hope this is helpful to other parents!

Is this good or bad? What solutions?

Think about it.

The French have spent centuries treating their language like a sacred artifact. The Académie Française exists specifically to protect French from “pollution.” They invent official replacements for every English tech word (courriel, logiciel, etc.). They’re extremely proud of how elegant and precise French is supposed to be.

Then along comes the most culturally dominant AI product of the decade and they call it… **ChatGPT**.

In French, “j’ai pété” literally means “I farted.”

So every single time a French person says the name of the tool out loud, they are forced to announce that they just farted.

This cannot be a coincidence. Sam Altman is not that careless with branding. They could have called it ChatAI, OpenChat, Athena, Hermes, literally anything else. Instead they chose the one combination of syllables that forces the most linguistically proud nation on Earth to repeatedly say “I farted” in polite company.

Still think it's just a coincidence? That one language was just an oversight? Consider this: French is the 4th most widely spoken language in the world!

It’s not about the technology. It’s a precision strike against French linguistic arrogance, executed with surgical cruelty and zero actual stakes.

Hello!

I'm wondering if anyone else is experiencing this or if someone's encountered/solved this before.

I'm trying to send JPG and PNG images to my ChatGPT to work on a project but it's telling me that the images are not coming though and that it's not receiving any attachments. I've tried through the browser and through the windows app. I've tried it inside and outside of projects. Each time, I get the same result. It tells me that it sees no attachments and asks me to re-send them. When I re-send them, it tells me that it still sees no attachments.

OpenAI Status page says there's no current issues.

Has anyone else had this problem before, or is currently experiencing it?

Prompt: Please could you create me a realistic horse model and walking animation in 3js

Used Terra 6.1 max. This took around 15 minutes and used 30% of my 5H limit (plus).

I first noticed it was going to find horse models online so told it to stop and that it must generate the model itself.

Cool that it made shadows but I probably should have prompted it to be photo realistic

Hello everyone. I do reverse engineering, but what I do is always personal, so I don't work for someone or a company to do RE. The problem I have is the unnecessary safeguards on mainstream AIs, Gemini is the worst in this case, and then it is chatGPT and then Claude in my experience.

Is there any way to fix this issue or any alternative? I really don't have powerful hardware; I have 12th Gen Intel CPU with iGPU. I can't locally host a model, and I don't know what to do.

For example, I have a VM and inside of that I was testing a sketchy "antivirus". it wasn't nod32 or Kaspersky or anything mainstream, it is from an unknown origin, and I wanted to know how it works and what it does, I noticed that virtual memory page exhaustion shuts it down and I figured it out by accident.

Now since I'm working on an "antivirus" and I want to find a way to replicate the same shutdown, AI just freaks out and refuses to help because it is "deactivating a security product". changing the wordings didn't help either.

Either I get "This answer cannot be shown" banner in chatGPT, when I give my IDA output to it, or I get "I'm sorry I can't do X" from Gemini.

I'm tired of wrestling with them

I’ve been experimenting with AI image generation, trying to figure out why so much of the artwork has that instantly recognizable AI look.

You know what I mean. The excessive glowing edges, bizarrely detailed textures, unnecessarily dramatic lighting, overcrowded compositions, and typography that seems designed to be impressive rather than readable.

I have a background in art and design, so I started treating ChatGPT like a junior designer. Instead of just generating new images when something looked wrong, I critiqued specific problems and developed a set of principles to address them.

One of the biggest discoveries was that reducing clutter isn’t the same as changing styles. When I criticized a neon-heavy poster, AI would often replace it with an equally cluttered vintage poster. Different aesthetic, same underlying problems.

Eventually, we developed 43 principles across composition, typography, texture, lighting, and artistic direction.

I’m sharing them because I think they could be useful for anyone working with AI-generated images, whether you’re an artist, designer, or just someone tired of everything looking like the same over-processed fantasy illustration.

The overarching philosophy: Design should look intentional, not merely impressive.

Composition & Visual Hierarchy
Restraint over spectacle. Don’t add elements just to make an image look impressive.
One dominant focal point. Give the viewer something obvious to look at first.
Negative space matters. Empty space isn’t a problem that needs fixing.
Remove unnecessary elements. If something isn’t contributing to the design, get rid of it.
Complexity needs a purpose. Intricate artwork is fine. An uncontrolled composition isn’t.

Typography
Legibility comes first. Don’t sacrifice readable letters for decorative effects.
Integrate typography into the composition. Text shouldn’t look randomly pasted over an illustration.
Limit competing type treatments. Not everything needs outlines, shadows, gradients, and a different font.
Create a clear reading order. Title first, essential information second.

Content & Communication
Stop adding lists to every flyer. Unless specifically requested, avoid cramming in lists of attractions, features, or activities.
Use only necessary copy. AI loves inventing taglines and promotional filler. Most designs don’t need them.
Show rather than explain. Let the artwork communicate the concept.
Don’t invent details. Fake addresses, dates, prices, and QR codes aren’t useful design elements.

Avoiding Generic AI Aesthetics
Stop defaulting to AI clichés. Neon, glowing particles, lens flares, excessive gradients, and dramatic lighting shouldn’t be automatic.
Polish isn’t originality. An elaborate image can still be completely generic.
Avoid stock-image thinking. Develop imagery around an actual concept.
Not everything needs to be cinematic, mystical, or ornate. Sometimes a simple illustration is more interesting.
Choose a coherent visual direction. Color, imagery, typography, and texture should feel like parts of the same design.

Working With AI as an Art Director
Treat criticism as art direction. Fix the underlying problem instead of making cosmetic adjustments.
Don’t replace one cliché with another. Switching neon clutter for vintage clutter isn’t an improvement.
Preserve what already works. When revising, don’t randomly change successful elements.
Critique the result before presenting it. Check hierarchy, legibility, unnecessary details, and visual coherence.
Don’t automatically agree with every criticism. Good creative collaboration includes independent judgment.
Material Authenticity & Texture
This was probably the most interesting part of the experiment.
There’s a particular texture that seems to appear in an enormous amount of AI-generated art. Everything looks simultaneously painterly, photographic, grainy, and digitally sharpened.
The stone, clouds, fabric, skin, and foliage somehow all share the same artificial surface quality.
These principles specifically target that problem.
Texture needs a reason to exist. It should come from the material, artistic technique, or environment.
Materials should look different. Stone shouldn’t have the same surface treatment as fabric or skin.
Avoid universal grain and distressing. Don’t coat the entire image in the same scratches, speckles, or artificial noise.
Choose a coherent artistic medium. Photography, illustration, painting, printmaking, and 3D rendering have different visual languages.
Avoid accidental medium mixing. Photographic anatomy combined with painted clouds and digitally rendered architecture can create an inconsistent result.

Detail & Visual Information
Establish a hierarchy of detail. The focal point can be highly resolved while secondary elements remain simple.
Allow quiet surfaces. Not every shadow, wall, or patch of sky needs intricate texture.
Avoid artificial microdetail. Tiny scratches, pores, and surface patterns don’t automatically make an image better.
Focus on large shapes first. Silhouette, proportion, and value structure matter more than decorative detail.
Use selective sharpness. Everything doesn’t need to be equally crisp.
Stop faking craftsmanship with texture. Random distressing isn’t a substitute for deliberate mark-making.
Lighting & Tonal Control
Lighting needs consistent logic. Highlights and shadows should follow a believable or intentionally stylized lighting scheme.
Stop outlining everything with glowing rim lights. It’s one of the most recognizable AI habits.
Let shadows stay dark. Not every dark surface needs artificially revealed detail.
Control microcontrast. Excessive local contrast makes everything look hyper-sharpened, metallic, or wet.
Use atmospheric effects selectively. Fog, bloom, haze, glowing particles, and light rays should exist for a reason.
Artistic Process & Authenticity
Design for a believable production method. The artwork should feel like something that could have been photographed, illustrated, painted, printed, or otherwise intentionally created.
Respect the limitations of the medium. If you’re imitating screen printing or lithography, the textures and color separations should make sense.
Imperfections should be intentional. Random scratches and distressed surfaces don’t automatically make something feel handmade.
Actively look for the AI texture signature. Check for repetitive detail, inconsistent materials, overprocessed surfaces, and grain that doesn’t belong. Fix the underlying image rather than hiding it with filters.

The two biggest takeaways
1. Design should look intentional, not merely impressive.
2. Detail should reveal the nature of the subject, not advertise the sophistication of the image generator.
I’m not advocating that every AI-generated image should be minimalist, photorealistic, or resemble traditional artwork. I actually love elaborate, theatrical, and highly stylized imagery.

What I want is intentional complexity rather than visual noise.

One practical technique that helped was evaluating designs at two sizes. At thumbnail scale, look at composition, silhouette, and hierarchy. At full resolution, inspect texture, lighting, edges, and material consistency.
And perhaps most importantly, stop treating image generation as a slot machine. Generating another image isn’t the same thing as improving the design.
These principles don’t magically fix every generation. Even with detailed instructions, the model sometimes repeats exactly the mistake it was told to avoid. But they’ve given me a much better vocabulary for directing and critiquing the results.

I’m curious whether other designers have noticed that distinctive AI surface texture, and whether you’ve found reliable ways to get rid of it.

Also, what principles would you add?

EDIT: Examples added.

So I had started using Codex a couple of months ago and back then, I was very impressed by it. I used to Sol (and Astra when it came out) and it was to the point, followed instructions and plans, none of the mind-melting phrasing and fluff that claude throws at you and apart from usage running our pretty quick, did the job quite well.

Fast forward this week, I used it after a month of hiatus and its nothing like it was before. I have tried Sol and Astra and different effort levels but I keep running into these problems

- Doesnt follow the plan or instructions

- Doesn't tell me what it did or whats the next steps are (mentioned in agents.md). So I always have to look deep into the code myseld

- Doesn't do what it says it will do. I tell it to start working on something. It repeats what I say, but doesnt start. ​

- Doesn't seem to process any critical thinking skills. It gives shallow, obvious answers that one can find through quick google searches. Instead of using extensive research to come up with its own reasoning on the best way to tackle an issue.

For example (one of many) I lay down the plan for a procedural generated grass model, from prototype to an alpha version. The plan is written down on a beads card (and a doc too) and I use hooks to link it to the card so its always aware of it. It works for a while, then shows me a grass model and says 'Done, everything landed'. I think, ok, promising. Then I look deeper and its just a handmade grass model, with nothing peocedural about it. I ask what in my plan made you do this, and it says, 'nothing, my bad'. I ask it to research procedural systems. It does some light research that doesnt meet the requirements of the depth mentioned in the plan. After a while it creates a rudimentary procedural generator, but that is just a generic one that it probably copied from some online source​, and doesnt match the requirements at all (requirements mentioned it should uss botanical habits and rules rather than artificial ones, I even gave it the example of a procedural tree system I had already created with claude as an example of the patterns to follow).

Did something change or am I going mad? Is there something regarding my promots or skills that I need to be doing different comoared to a couple of months ago?​

I’ve noticed ChatGPT offering worse and worse code recently, getting confused about what I’m asking it and seemingly less efficient at solving issues.

Am I imagining this or is something going on? I did read that there’s a point of diminishing returns where adding more data eventually decreases performance.

Everyone’s talking about AI becoming more and more intelligent but I swear it’s getting worse.

I'm currently on a free trial of ChatGPT Plus, and something really weird has been happening with my Codex usage limits, for the third time in the past few days my weekly usage limit has randomly reset to almost 100% even though the scheduled reset date was still several days away.

Yesterday (Oct 27): 24% weekly usage remaining, scheduled to reset on November 2.

Today (Oct 28): Suddenly 99% remaining, with the next reset pushed to November 4.

I didn't request or manually trigger any resets. I also checked Settings → Usage & Billing → Usage Limit Resets → History, and it says "No banked reset activity in the past 30 days."

I've been carefully managing my remaining quota for a coding project so seeing it suddenly refill while the reset date keeps moving forward is pretty confusing, I'm not complaining about getting extra usage obviously but I'm just trying to understand what's happening and whether I can actually rely on these limits when planning my work.

Has anyone else experienced this recently? Is this some kind of automatic/global reset, a display bug, or something related to the Plus free trial?

Bro asked permission to talk to himself...

I told it "do the math" and it came up with so many formulas that I can not keep up with. It worked for maybe 20 minutes and I can not do anything with the result. Its like a university professor spoke to me explaining stuff I dont know. Asking it "Explain it to me so that I can understand" took an entire hour for the model to break it down and I still dont understand it.