If CBT performed as well as David Burns suggests, we’d really have no need for therapists. Alas, it turns out that cognitive problems aren’t a factor in a lot of mental health. I state this as someone who’s read all the literature and spent 8 years floundering in CBT oriented therapy without much changing but the practitioner. It’s not a cure-all or even a cure-most, but it’s treated as such because it has properties that match well to medical insurance billing practices.
> And of people I know who see a therapist, practically none can tell me what exactly they are doing or what methods they are doing or how anything is structured.
I could tell you that as a client, but that’s because I’ve read into it. This is sort of like asking an ER patient to describe the shift management system of the clinic they went into.
This has been my experience. When it comes down to it, CBT is just more effective version of “try hard harder”.
What’s really aggravating is CBT was never designed to be a general, cure-all therapy and I think the people behind it know this. But try explaining nuance to a public that doesn’t want to hear.
It was really proof that gameplay often takes a back seat to visual identity, ESPECIALLY if the gameplay is extremely derivative, which this was. They had a massive amount of goodwill from fans of the genre, but when they started sharing screenshots it deflated fast - its not a 2025 game, its a 2010 clone of a popular 2005 game. Its nigh impossible to make a spiritual successor to genre defining games in WC3 and SC2 - too many things need to go perfect.
It had a better chance if it could find its own voice, but it ended up feeling like a direct to home video sequel to a popular movie
Huh the gameplay was ass?
The units weren't interesting, the strategies derivative, the flow bad, the balance off, not even half finished campaign and 0 goodwill from kickstarters after rugpulling content that was promised and charging them for it
The sign for me was when the art style was announced. The last thing in the world I want from a modern RTS is Fortnite-style animation targeted towards tweens.
I agree, I think MOBAs superceded the "real time" part of RTS's, while the more turn based Civ/4x, Total War series strategy type games ended up taking a lot of the base building part. Having them both together was just straight up difficult and incredibly intense, like the game itself demanded you be on adderall because your attention cannot wane for a single moment.
The better I got at competitive RTS's the less interesting the game got for me, it just kinda of felt like chess where there was only going to be one or two interesting interactions in the game if played well, otherwise its just a game of who makes a mistake too early.
Teamfight Tactics and Autochess are interesting newer entries though, allowing time to strategize and adding a lot of randomness to the games, where you can't just play one build. Even then though, as these games get more and more explored, "optimal" strategy gets eventually discovered and the game devs especially in TFT are in a race to try to keep things high variance but also seem fair - its definitely a difficult job!
> The better I got at competitive RTS's the less interesting the game got for me, it just kinda of felt like chess where there was only going to be one or two interesting interactions in the game if played well, otherwise its just a game of who makes a mistake too early.
I feel the exact same way. The ELO system saves you from getting steamrolled if you’re a casual player but improving just means the game becomes formulaic to the point of no longer being fun. Stronghold 2 was kind of interesting in that it was an unranked lobby with good variation in player ability and team-oriented maps. Most players knew the basic economic and combat metas, but you’d often end up in situations where one of your teammates dropped out on a 3 vs 3 and you’d still win.
It had its time, but its just not accessible to people - shooters which require as much attention, mechanical skill and perseverance but at least matches are relatively quick and there's a team element. Starcraft can be just grind grind grind all of your openers and don't stop, don't sleep, don't eat, just queue
> AI companies will be paid a portion of the savings from claims they deny or, as the Wasteful and Inappropriate Service Reduction plan puts it, “compensated based on a share of averted expenditures.”
Maybe someone who’s really good at Markets and Incentives can tell us all what might happen here.
In other words, this isn't even a cost-saving measure. They are now paying money to deny claims. Instead of paying money to provide healthcare, they instead pay money to third-party administrators who promise they won't actually do administrative work but instead outsource life-ruining decisions to an automated script. It is hard to come away from this without thinking that humanity is fundamentally evil, and that everyone involved in this should be treated like French royalty.
It’s more that it takes so long to get anything done, the effort and results need to be recorded because it most often won’t be obvious from the impact. It’s hard to make a splash on a production system maintained by 30 other people, but you can usually make things better, but it won’t always be obvious.
AI is busy quietly convincing every executive that uses it that they have no use for people to work out the details of their ideas anymore. It’s so frustrating to have these drive by executives come into a space you’re working in, drop in a 15 page deep think report they got from a 2 sentence prompt and call that contributing. Bonus points if the report is from an AI platform your company doesn’t have approved so you as a line employee can get written up for.
Not only are you discouraged from criticizing half baked manager-metric led implementations, you’re deeply incentivized to openly praise it if you want to be considered for the next well-funded initiative.
People with fiefdoms don’t like criticism. Microsoft pays their vassal dependent companies to use their products, no users actually like or would choose the products (Teams? 365 copilot? Azure?), and the whole enclosed ecosystem is pretty awful.
Count me as that weird user that would choose Azure any second over AWS. The integration and interface stability they offer is simply better. Teams sucks indeed, but as I don't know any less-suck alternative I'll have to trust you, and the with Copilot I never bothered much so again can't tell.
I think were it rewritten with the current leadership, the very first thing they'd remove would be this topic line:
> Army professionals recognize the intrinsic dignity and worth of all people and treat them with respect
Both in political and corporate (especially tech) leadership, this principle has proven to be convenient to say and equally convenient to be tossed aside with the slightest provocation - people are seen as consumers, workers, undesirables, or chattel, not as beings with dignity, that is only for people in privileged positions.
Not only that, read the chapter on counterproductive leadership (toxic leadership). Try to tick the boxes for the current US president. Spoiler alert, he ticks all the boxes.
> And of people I know who see a therapist, practically none can tell me what exactly they are doing or what methods they are doing or how anything is structured.
I could tell you that as a client, but that’s because I’ve read into it. This is sort of like asking an ER patient to describe the shift management system of the clinic they went into.
reply