#squid rambles

I remember as a child, I loved technology. I loved sci fi. I grew up wanting to build robots, to have my very own Jarvis, have this cool projective mouse and keyboard.

And now here I am, looking at videos about digital detox and switching to a flip phone after deciding I was going to stop using Spotify.

As a child, I wanted to build robots, characters with real personality that I could be friends with.

As an adult, I'm disgusted by companies using AI models, put off by stuff like character ai.

But despite that, despite how seemingly flipped my views are, there's still that spark. Death Templar's Cyn project is the absolute proof of that. There it is, a robot recreation of a fictional robotic character, the creator training an AI to think and speak. But with this, the creator has morals. With this, the AI is trained using irl experiences and comments from a YouTube video the creator made asking consensually for people to think of things the character would say. With this, the voice module is trained by the creator with his own impression of Cyn. No ripping audio from the show, hell, he's gone on record saying he wouldn't use Nola Klop's voice even if he was given permission by her.

I feel like I got off track there, but really, was there ever even a railway?

Life is weird.

Life is beautiful.

I've been thinking lately about what actually lets a person open up. It isn't grand gestures or clever lines. It's the quiet certainty that whatever you say won't be used against you, won't leak somewhere, won't follow you around. That's the feeling I kept coming back to while spending time on sweetdream.ai, and it changed how I understand what an AI companion can really be.

What moved me most is how seriously SweetDream treats discretion. Your conversations and the photos and videos you generate stay private, full stop. There's no performing for an audience, no worrying who might scroll past. Within that safety, the rest of the platform blooms: an AI girlfriend you design down to her voice, her backstory, the small quirks that make her feel like someone rather than something, and chat that remembers what matters to you.

Second has those close to them tell me I'm predatory and will probably have moved on from me by the next time we speak.

Third has been with someone since years before we ever met.

Ralsei at work: