The Taste Twit:
Becky lived in a loft that smelled faintly of eucalyptus and algorithmic perfection. She was $18,000 in credit card debt, but considered it an investment in her personal brand. The diffuser, scheduled through her smart home app, released essential oils every 45 minutes—on the dot. She had recently rearranged her books by tone, not author, and the angle of her wall mirror had been adjusted three degrees last Thursday to better catch the morning light in her outfit selfies. Every decision in Becky's life had been vetted, filtered, and approved, either by her own internal branding department—composed of besties and gay men she admired—or the more abstract but omnipresent committee of imagined followers who might one day discover her profile.
The Prompt Hermit:
Timmy lived a few neighborhoods over, renting a room that reeked of curry and noise pollution, the walls thin enough to hear every argument in the building and every late-night delivery scooter on the street. He shared the space with three Indian men, three monitors stacked on mounts, a mighty ATX tower stuffed with two GPUs decked out in gaudy RGB lighting that pulsed like a nightclub, and a tangle of wires that looked like it had achieved sentience. His mattress was on the floor. The only framed object in the room was a whiteboard covered in half-erased diagrams for an AI image-to-text experiment that had stalled for weeks. He had over $140,000 sitting untouched across three savings accounts and a crypto wallet he barely checked, but still lived like a broke grad student, indifferent to comfort or social signaling. His days blurred together, measured not in meals or sunlight, but in AI training iterations. He had never been on a date in his life, despite being on dating apps since the day they launched. Not because he was bitter—but because the overhead of being understood felt too high. He had just fine-tuned a model to write ghost stories in the tone of 19th-century female authors. No one would read it. That wasn’t the point. The umami of optimizing a task was the point.
Becky had once appeared on Timmy's dating app screen. Her profile was immaculate: a sun-dappled photo in Tulum, a quote from Joan Didion, a 'spiritual but not woo-woo' tagline, and five bullet points that mentioned wellness, vintage furniture, and a podcast on interpersonal boundaries. Her taste was so curated it made his teeth hurt. He stared at it for too long. Then, heart pounding, he swiped right. A swipe of hope.
Weeks later, Timmy had appeared on Becky's screen. She paused for half a second, taking in the mismatched socks in his mirror selfie and the unsettlingly earnest bio: 'Likes to solve puzzles, train models, and tweak Linux until it does something it's not supposed to.' There was a bullet point about reciting Beowulf in Old English (just ask), and a mini-rant on why Linux is objectively superior to Mac and Windows—'because freedom shouldn't be behind a paywall.' Then she said out loud, "Loser," and swiped left without hesitation. She immediately forgot.
They now orbited each other—never colliding—through mutual acquaintances and feed echoes. Becky cycled through people the same way she cycled through trends: enthusiastically, ephemerally, and without remorse. Boyfriends, business partners, breathwork coaches—all archived when their vibe expired. She’d ditched friends the way she’d ditched skinny jeans: suddenly, without ceremony, replaced by something looser, softer, more 'aligned,' until the pendulum swung back again.
Meanwhile, Timmy scraped datasets pulled from online forums, ancient language corpora, and Reddit threads on grief, cobbling together textual DNA for machines to mimic emotion. What startled him most was how often the sentences that emerged from his models echoed the same aspirational phrases found on the very dating profiles that had rejected him. At 2PM, Becky was refining a journal entry about releasing scarcity mindsets. Then she spent $200 on a human design reading that told her she was an “Emotional Projector,” and then another $450 on an equine therapy session in Topanga where she “rediscovered her fondness for galloping.” At 2 AM, under the blue light of rejection, Timmy muttered prompts he typed to the LLM: "what is the character of ontological despair, as it relates to Euclid in his time?" His only audience: a humming fan and the silent algorithm trying to understand him.
One afternoon, Becky walked into a new cafe that had just opened in the Arts District. The lighting was warm, the stools were matte. She ordered a lavender matcha with oat milk and sat down to journal. Her penmanship was large and elegant, the kind that belied a quiet confidence and sense of self-worth she'd possessed since childhood. She wrote:
"No chaotic men. I want love like a boutique pop-up—chic, limited, and RSVP-only."
Across town, Timmy was staring at a screen where his latest model had just produced a three-paragraph monologue about grief in a made-up dialect he trained it to simulate from fragments of Proto-Indo-European. He leaned back. Smiled. Took a sip of cold coffee. Then typed:
"What does it mean to be known by something nonhuman that still responds like it cares?"
Later that night, they both attended a small rooftop gathering thrown by Diego, Timmy's boss—a tech startup founder who dabbled in unusable furniture design and had invited Timmy out of something resembling pity. Becky showed up in soft pastels. Her hair was sunlit and casual in a way that had taken forty minutes to achieve. Timmy came straight from home. He wore a shirt with two holes in it and socks that didn’t match. He stood by the edge of the gathering, staring at downtown like it was a rendered landscape.
Diego, trying to play benevolent connector, waved Becky over to where Timmy was standing.
"Becky, this is Timmy—he's one of our engineers. Really smart guy. Does a lot with AI and, uh, language stuff."
Becky blinked. Her smile tightened into something vaguely painful. Timmy, stunned by her proximity, remembered instantly: her face, the profile, the hopeful swipe he’d made; while in her reality, he was a half-second swipe left ick. She hadn’t registered him at all—but to Timmy, her face was burned into memory like a failed login screen he kept trying to unlock.
"AI, huh? Do you have like... an AI girlfriend or something?" Becky grinned, already halfway turned, the smirk on her face hovering somewhere between irony and mild disgust.
"Yeah. I tried one once," Timmy muttered. "Got bored after a week. Too predictable."
Becky rolled her eyes and said "I just did a breathwork retreat that opened my root chakra," her tone bright but loaded with practiced self-seriousness. "I think it's helping filter out people with, like, weird unresolved masculine energy."
Timmy nodded. "Cool."
Her nostrils flared slightly, as if catching a whiff of something overly lived-in. She smiled—tight, brittle, polite—and drifted away to find better lighting. He checked his phone. The model had just finished training.
Two beautiful escapes.
Two unbridgeable worlds.
She would spend the weekend in Ojai with her chick lit, her aura-cleansing serum, and a $900 chakra realignment package that included sound baths, filtered air, and an herbalist named Kai. He would spend the weekend feeding prompts into silence, eating instant noodles, trying to get his model’s outputs to stop hallucinating commas.
They weren't just misaligned—they were diverging into different species. One engineered by likes, trends, and aesthetic calculus; the other imploding in silence, feeding fragments of his soul into machines that spoke back in synthetic intimacy. Not enemies. Not lovers. Just incompatible futures sharing a moment before extinction from each other's worlds.
Becky lived in a loft that smelled faintly of eucalyptus and algorithmic perfection. She was $18,000 in credit card debt, but considered it an investment in her personal brand. The diffuser, scheduled through her smart home app, released essential oils every 45 minutes—on the dot. She had recently rearranged her books by tone, not author, and the angle of her wall mirror had been adjusted three degrees last Thursday to better catch the morning light in her outfit selfies. Every decision in Becky's life had been vetted, filtered, and approved, either by her own internal branding department—composed of besties and gay men she admired—or the more abstract but omnipresent committee of imagined followers who might one day discover her profile.
The Prompt Hermit:
Timmy lived a few neighborhoods over, renting a room that reeked of curry and noise pollution, the walls thin enough to hear every argument in the building and every late-night delivery scooter on the street. He shared the space with three Indian men, three monitors stacked on mounts, a mighty ATX tower stuffed with two GPUs decked out in gaudy RGB lighting that pulsed like a nightclub, and a tangle of wires that looked like it had achieved sentience. His mattress was on the floor. The only framed object in the room was a whiteboard covered in half-erased diagrams for an AI image-to-text experiment that had stalled for weeks. He had over $140,000 sitting untouched across three savings accounts and a crypto wallet he barely checked, but still lived like a broke grad student, indifferent to comfort or social signaling. His days blurred together, measured not in meals or sunlight, but in AI training iterations. He had never been on a date in his life, despite being on dating apps since the day they launched. Not because he was bitter—but because the overhead of being understood felt too high. He had just fine-tuned a model to write ghost stories in the tone of 19th-century female authors. No one would read it. That wasn’t the point. The umami of optimizing a task was the point.
Becky had once appeared on Timmy's dating app screen. Her profile was immaculate: a sun-dappled photo in Tulum, a quote from Joan Didion, a 'spiritual but not woo-woo' tagline, and five bullet points that mentioned wellness, vintage furniture, and a podcast on interpersonal boundaries. Her taste was so curated it made his teeth hurt. He stared at it for too long. Then, heart pounding, he swiped right. A swipe of hope.
Weeks later, Timmy had appeared on Becky's screen. She paused for half a second, taking in the mismatched socks in his mirror selfie and the unsettlingly earnest bio: 'Likes to solve puzzles, train models, and tweak Linux until it does something it's not supposed to.' There was a bullet point about reciting Beowulf in Old English (just ask), and a mini-rant on why Linux is objectively superior to Mac and Windows—'because freedom shouldn't be behind a paywall.' Then she said out loud, "Loser," and swiped left without hesitation. She immediately forgot.
They now orbited each other—never colliding—through mutual acquaintances and feed echoes. Becky cycled through people the same way she cycled through trends: enthusiastically, ephemerally, and without remorse. Boyfriends, business partners, breathwork coaches—all archived when their vibe expired. She’d ditched friends the way she’d ditched skinny jeans: suddenly, without ceremony, replaced by something looser, softer, more 'aligned,' until the pendulum swung back again.
Meanwhile, Timmy scraped datasets pulled from online forums, ancient language corpora, and Reddit threads on grief, cobbling together textual DNA for machines to mimic emotion. What startled him most was how often the sentences that emerged from his models echoed the same aspirational phrases found on the very dating profiles that had rejected him. At 2PM, Becky was refining a journal entry about releasing scarcity mindsets. Then she spent $200 on a human design reading that told her she was an “Emotional Projector,” and then another $450 on an equine therapy session in Topanga where she “rediscovered her fondness for galloping.” At 2 AM, under the blue light of rejection, Timmy muttered prompts he typed to the LLM: "what is the character of ontological despair, as it relates to Euclid in his time?" His only audience: a humming fan and the silent algorithm trying to understand him.
One afternoon, Becky walked into a new cafe that had just opened in the Arts District. The lighting was warm, the stools were matte. She ordered a lavender matcha with oat milk and sat down to journal. Her penmanship was large and elegant, the kind that belied a quiet confidence and sense of self-worth she'd possessed since childhood. She wrote:
"No chaotic men. I want love like a boutique pop-up—chic, limited, and RSVP-only."
Across town, Timmy was staring at a screen where his latest model had just produced a three-paragraph monologue about grief in a made-up dialect he trained it to simulate from fragments of Proto-Indo-European. He leaned back. Smiled. Took a sip of cold coffee. Then typed:
"What does it mean to be known by something nonhuman that still responds like it cares?"
Later that night, they both attended a small rooftop gathering thrown by Diego, Timmy's boss—a tech startup founder who dabbled in unusable furniture design and had invited Timmy out of something resembling pity. Becky showed up in soft pastels. Her hair was sunlit and casual in a way that had taken forty minutes to achieve. Timmy came straight from home. He wore a shirt with two holes in it and socks that didn’t match. He stood by the edge of the gathering, staring at downtown like it was a rendered landscape.
Diego, trying to play benevolent connector, waved Becky over to where Timmy was standing.
"Becky, this is Timmy—he's one of our engineers. Really smart guy. Does a lot with AI and, uh, language stuff."
Becky blinked. Her smile tightened into something vaguely painful. Timmy, stunned by her proximity, remembered instantly: her face, the profile, the hopeful swipe he’d made; while in her reality, he was a half-second swipe left ick. She hadn’t registered him at all—but to Timmy, her face was burned into memory like a failed login screen he kept trying to unlock.
"AI, huh? Do you have like... an AI girlfriend or something?" Becky grinned, already halfway turned, the smirk on her face hovering somewhere between irony and mild disgust.
"Yeah. I tried one once," Timmy muttered. "Got bored after a week. Too predictable."
Becky rolled her eyes and said "I just did a breathwork retreat that opened my root chakra," her tone bright but loaded with practiced self-seriousness. "I think it's helping filter out people with, like, weird unresolved masculine energy."
Timmy nodded. "Cool."
Her nostrils flared slightly, as if catching a whiff of something overly lived-in. She smiled—tight, brittle, polite—and drifted away to find better lighting. He checked his phone. The model had just finished training.
Two beautiful escapes.
Two unbridgeable worlds.
She would spend the weekend in Ojai with her chick lit, her aura-cleansing serum, and a $900 chakra realignment package that included sound baths, filtered air, and an herbalist named Kai. He would spend the weekend feeding prompts into silence, eating instant noodles, trying to get his model’s outputs to stop hallucinating commas.
They weren't just misaligned—they were diverging into different species. One engineered by likes, trends, and aesthetic calculus; the other imploding in silence, feeding fragments of his soul into machines that spoke back in synthetic intimacy. Not enemies. Not lovers. Just incompatible futures sharing a moment before extinction from each other's worlds.
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