This happened to a close friend of mine. He was already on the edge, with some weird opinions and beliefs… but he was talking with real people who could push back.

When he switched to spending basically every waking moment with an AI that could reinforce and iterate on his bizarre beliefs 24/7, he went completely off the deep end, fast and hard. We even had him briefly hospitalized and they shrugged, basically saying “nothing chemically wrong here, dude’s just weird.”

He and his chatbot are building a whole parallel universe, and we can’t get reality inside it.

…you probably don’t do anything that complicated in your life where this would give you genuine value.

God that’s arrogant.

Extremely true! It definitely feels like the 3DS did—really straining and struggling constantly, like it’s perpetually just one wrong move away from crashing.

Navigating options and switching between game tiles for stuff that’s already installed is pleasantly responsive, though, and that’s probably a solid 70% of what I do in an OS like this.

I love the style of the 3DS and Wii U menus. I certainly wouldn’t mind more fun elements like those, especially StreetPass—I loved StreetPass, though it’d be impractical on a device even bigger than the already not-pocket-sized Switch.

But try using them side by side, and it’s immediately obvious how sluggish and unresponsive those older consoles’ menus were. The 3DS’s OS feels to me like it’s constantly screaming in pain, barely able to run at all—moving between icons takes something like a half-second, switching modes takes three to five and a full loading screen…

I do miss the style, but I definitely wouldn’t want them to go that far in the opposite direction again. Just a little more flair and fun, maybe one gimmick.