It's a sad, sad day when love dies

Here are the fics that set my ridiculously high expectations for any sort of sequel(s). I have lots of favorite fics out there, and there are plenty of great recommendations in general, but I'd like to focus SPECIFICALLY on post-book/s1 canon compliant fics written before s2 was announced. Would love a thread of these, so please reblog and add your own fic recs that you think would make a great sequel!

Category 1: Top 3 Recommendations

In All Things, Balance by Kedreeva (T, 17k, 2019)

https://archiveofourown.org/works/20320441

GO READ IT! In the back of my mind, I always considered this to be canon, which I didn't realize until actual canon didn't meet those expectations. Missing a bit on the human side of things, but otherwise a fantastic alternative.

Choices by Bookwormgal (T, 154k, 2019-2022, 8 part series)

https://archiveofourown.org/series/1739542

Humans from the book continue the story with Heaven and Hell. Honestly I read this so long ago that I don't remember much, but I do recall that this filled the void of how flat the human characters (particularly the children) were written in the adaptation (i.e. s1)

Akashic Records by peniG (G/T, 206k, 2019-2020, 26 part series)

https://archiveofourown.org/series/1446628

To skip straight to the sequel-to-book/s1, start with part 21, although I highly recommend the full series. This has, hands down, always been the canon I've been missing. This fills in all the gaps we don't have in the source material in a satisfying way while staying true to the characters and themes. They really respect both Aziraphale and Crowley as intelligent, experienced partners who are clever and fallible and perfect.

Additional recommendations under the cut!

Here are the fics that set my ridiculously high expectations for any sort of sequel(s). I have lots of favorite fics out there, and there are plenty of great recommendations in general, but I'd like to focus SPECIFICALLY on post-book/s1 canon compliant fics written before s2 was announced. Would love a thread of these, so please reblog and add your own fic recs that you think would make a great sequel!

Category 1: Top 3 Recommendations

In All Things, Balance by Kedreeva (T, 17k, 2019)

https://archiveofourown.org/works/20320441

GO READ IT! In the back of my mind, I always considered this to be canon, which I didn't realize until actual canon didn't meet those expectations. Missing a bit on the human side of things, but otherwise a fantastic alternative.

Choices by Bookwormgal (T, 154k, 2019-2022, 8 part series)

https://archiveofourown.org/series/1739542

Humans from the book continue the story with Heaven and Hell. Honestly I read this so long ago that I don't remember much, but I do recall that this filled the void of how flat the human characters (particularly the children) were written in the adaptation (i.e. s1)

Akashic Records by peniG (G/T, 206k, 2019-2020, 26 part series)

https://archiveofourown.org/series/1446628

To skip straight to the sequel-to-book/s1, start with part 21, although I highly recommend the full series. This has, hands down, always been the canon I've been missing. This fills in all the gaps we don't have in the source material in a satisfying way while staying true to the characters and themes. They really respect both Aziraphale and Crowley as intelligent, experienced partners who are clever and fallible and perfect.

Additional recommendations under the cut!

My hands:

It's a

'hey we've been spying on you and tracking your every move. it's a culmination of state of the art technology and an unprecedented invasion of consumer privacy. a room full of men with made up jobs bent their will toward decades of constructing this system, defending it in court, and tirelessly innovating new ways to aggregate more data about you'

and the end result is

'yeah so uh we saw that you recently bought a car. so here's an ad for that car'

me as soon as im home:

Not sometimes. Not until the next update. Always. They proved it with math.

Even with perfect training data and unlimited computing power, AI models will still confidently tell you things that are completely false. This isn't a bug they're working on. It's baked into how these systems work at a fundamental level.

And their own numbers are brutal. OpenAI's o1 reasoning model hallucinates 16% of the time. Their newer o3 model? 33%. Their newest o4-mini? 48%. Nearly half of what their most recent model tells you could be fabricated. The "smarter" models are actually getting worse at telling the truth.

Here's why it can't be fixed. Language models work by predicting the next word based on probability. When they hit something uncertain, they don't pause. They don't flag it. They guess. And they guess with complete confidence, because that's exactly what they were trained to do.

The researchers looked at the 10 biggest AI benchmarks used to measure how good these models are. 9 out of 10 give the same score for saying "I don't know" as for giving a completely wrong answer: zero points. The entire testing system literally punishes honesty and rewards guessing.

So the AI learned the optimal strategy: always guess. Never admit uncertainty. Sound confident even when you're making it up.

OpenAI's proposed fix? Have ChatGPT say "I don't know" when it's unsure. Their own math shows this would mean roughly 30% of your questions get no answer. Imagine asking ChatGPT something three times out of ten and getting "I'm not confident enough to respond." Users would leave overnight. So the fix exists, but it would kill the product.

This isn't just OpenAI's problem. DeepMind and Tsinghua University independently reached the same conclusion. Three of the world's top AI labs, working separately, all agree: this is permanent.

what's this one called?

I... was wrong? N-no.... its... impossible!

I made all the proper calculations... The dual camera, the separated flash, the fingerprint scanner!! Even the holo type backglass! My deduction was perfect-

Wh-what?!?!

The... the color..!! Whats going on here? You mean its not a trick of the light, but a gradient design?! Such an obvious tell, and I missed it?! No, that... thats impossible!!!