"Are you located in the EU? If yes, max volume will be restricted. Yes/No" On the surface, it's about public safety. Protecting hearing. Preventing disturbance. But as I found myself in a discussion about it online, it became clear that my issue wasn't really with the decibels, but about a **fundamental shift** in how we relate to our tools, our governments, and our responsibilities. ## 🤔 Public Health or Safety Theater? Let's give the regulators the benefit of the doubt - loud music can damage your hearing, and this is well-intended. But in this case circumventing the max volume is trivial. Of course the owner in the original post selected "No". But even if you selected "Yes", simply restarting the device brings up the prompt again. With some other devices it's just a warning once you go past a certain volume, gently nudging you to not listen at the max. Many young people genuinely don't know that loud music is dangerous. And this is what I'm really concerned about - parents are the ones who must bear primary responsibility for their children's health. So why are they letting children habitually listen to loud music at 90-100dB for long periods of time? Work, chores, and stress leave many parents with less and less family time. This decrease in parenting (and increase of threats to our children) is unfortunately leading us to **delegate** more and more of our traditional social structures to government. ## ✅ The Case for Localized Responsibility First, let's quickly tackle the safety issue - if we truly care about protecting hearing, we can solve this at a much more local level. Instead of an easy to circumvent max volume, we could require that all standalone speakers allow customers to set their own limits. Say, a **parental control** setting protected by a password. Manufacturers can pre-set limits for safe sale to minors. Parents can limit the max volume for their kids. Audiophiles can blast their eardrums away at will. This approach respects individual agency. It acknowledges that an adult using a speaker at a private outdoor event might need more power than a child in a bedroom. It moves the decision-making power from unelected bureaucrats in Brussels back to the citizen holding the device. ## 📈 The True Cost isn't Financial, but Spiritual There is, of course, a cost to any regulation. We pay the salaries of bureaucrats to write the rules. Then we pay engineers like myself to implement them, and companies pass that cost down to consumers. My proposal for password-protected max volume could be even more expensive than a simple yes/no prompt. But more importantly, there is a **spiritual toll**. It's the cost of being increasingly "parented" by our well-meaning governments. When every risk is smoothed over by regulation, we lose the habit of personal responsibility. We might even stop thinking about "safe levels" because we assume the government has already done the thinking for us. What happens when we're in a situation that doesn't have this protection? Our car stereo, our old analog speakers, a loud concert? We can't pave the jungle - we have to put on some boots. ## ☠️ Death by a Thousand Cuts A single regulation on Bluetooth speakers is a non-issue. It may even be a good thing, raising awareness of the dangers of loud noises. But over decades, such regulation is death by a thousand cuts from bureaucratic paper - each one a tiny slice of agency removed from us. In my mind, this ties into the concept of **human self-domestication**. By removing all friction and risk from our environment through centralized decree, we are essentially domesticating ourselves. We become more docile, more dependent on the system, and less capable of navigating reality without a regulatory harness. This process has [physical effects across many domesticated animals](https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/psychology/articles/10.3389/fpsyg.2019/00521/full), including humans. While these effects like having a lower aggression drive are not necessarily a bad thing, we have to preserve our competence and ability to think independently. Otherwise, when some part of the system inevitably fails catastrophically, we will find ourselves unable to function. And one day the fate of human civilization may depend on the few who still can. ``` ### Overtherapizing Men's Mental Health - Markdown: https://vdsabev.github.io/overtherapizing-mens-mental-health.md - HTML: https://vdsabev.github.io/overtherapizing-mens-mental-health/ ```markdown --- status: "published" title: "Overtherapizing Men's Mental Health" date: "2026-02-02" description: "Talking about emotions isn't enough for men's mental health - finding meaning through Function, Family, and Faith offers a better path." image: "https://github.com/user-attachments/assets/435e5746-13b6-4f78-b91f-f311ddf08a58" imageAlt: "A gnarled pine tree with exposed roots on a rocky cliff overlooking Yosemite's Half Dome, illuminated by golden sunset light piercing through dramatic storm clouds with low mist in the valley." author: "Vlad Sabev" authorUrl: "https://github.com/vdsabev" authorAvatar: "https://github.com/vdsabev.png" tags: ["culture","family","psychology"] navigationIndex: 0 --- *"Men need to talk about their feelings."* But when they do, they're called *attention-seeking*. *"Men should be expressing their emotions."* But when they do, they're labeled as *toxic*. *"Men can cry in public too."* But when they do, women get the ick. You *are* actually supposed to be composed and suppress your emotions in front of people. If all men expressed our emotions directly and instantly, the result would be an inordinate amount of violence and crime. And while talking about your feelings is fine, it doesn't solve the underlying problem, which is usually downstream of feeling useless, powerless, or replaceable. Instead, we need to channel our emotions into productive efforts. Controlling your emotions is not unhealthy - we're just in the wrong environment for it. We have effectively defeated most natural problems we evolved for over a million years, and are left with societal problems that are infinite at any level of affluence (as classic Russian literature amply demonstrates). Men are not as good at solving those as they are at natural problems. The other reason men's culture has become "unhealthy" in modernity is that we're increasingly giving up on following the main pathways to meaning: - **Function** - work, charity, general usefulness to society. Email jobs, scrolling on social media, and playing video games does not help with feeling productive and useful. - **Family** - most men will say providing for their family is the greatest purpose of their life, yet we are getting married and having children later and later in life, if at all. - **Faith** - accessible to all, this path goes the deepest, and you can choose to follow it at any time - even at your very last breath. I have hope more of us will decide to. In [Small Bets](https://smallbets.com) we talk about working like a lion on the hunt. But humans were once hunters too - and some still find meaning in defeating natural adversities. If you haven't, I recommend watching [Happy People](https://www.imdb.com/title/tt1683876) by Werner Herzog, or how some other indigenous people live to this day. Maybe your instinct to go work on a farm is correct - if for nothing else, then to remember what it feels like when a problem is finite, physical, and responds directly to your effort. Then when you find yourself sitting around the table having dinner with family, pleasantly tired after a good day's work - all your troublesome feelings magically disappear. On to the next day! ``` ### Rich Storytelling with AI World Models - Markdown: https://vdsabev.github.io/rich-storytelling-with-ai-world-models.md - HTML: https://vdsabev.github.io/rich-storytelling-with-ai-world-models/ ```markdown --- status: "published" title: "Rich Storytelling with AI World Models" date: "2026-02-02" description: "How AI world models like Genie 3 could revolutionize storytelling, democratize game development, and let creators build immersive worlds from imagination." image: "https://github.com/user-attachments/assets/fa9dbba3-e376-4062-8083-591dc7e5cd19" imageAlt: "Four friends in a living room watching a large, futuristic screen displaying a fantasy castle floating above the clouds, surrounded by digital data streams." author: "Vlad Sabev" authorUrl: "https://github.com/vdsabev" authorAvatar: "https://github.com/vdsabev.png" tags: ["ai","game development","storytelling"] navigationIndex: 0 --- ## 🧞 Genie 3 Out of the Bottle A wider release of [Genie 3](https://deepmind.google/models/genie/) last week resulted in some [impressive demos on X](https://x.com/mattshumer_/status/2017058981286396001) of gameplay generated on the fly, without playing an actual game. Things that even 5 years ago nobody would imagine possible are now becoming reality. Critics will point out one serious flaw - and it's not the low frame rate or the high cost, but the **lack of persistence**. One demo showed how [a mountain ledge disappears when you turn your back](https://x.com/firagawalkwthme/status/2017502322654646436). For most games, this is untenable - place a vase on a table, turn around, and it should still be there - not transform into a teapot or vanish entirely. **Persistence matters** because it maintains the suspension of disbelief required for immersive storytelling. Without it, AI worlds become chaos engines that break reality with every glance. Instead of a coherent experience, you get a whooshing sense of vertigo. This could work well enough in a linear rogue-like game on rails, but it would never reach the richness and depth of the well-crafted worlds we know from literary works. --- ## ⛏️ The IP Goldmine Remember the last time your beloved book series got adapted to TV? *Rings of Power*, *Wheel of Time*, *The Witcher*. How did those turn out? Exorbitantly expensive productions that strayed far from the source material fans loved. Literally adapting a book scene-by-scene remains too expensive for traditional media. Studios face impossible choices: compress 1,000 pages into 8 hours, change characters to fit modern sensibilities, or invent new plotlines. Each compromise alienates fans who just wanted to see the world they know brought to life. Games have been somewhat better at respecting the source material - one could, in fact, [simply walk into Mordor](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LYipECdYpXc) - but the development costs are still high. The entertainment industry has long prioritized existing IP over original concepts. AI world generation will continue this - just as the Marvel Cinematic Universe built an interconnected franchise, models like Genie could let fans step into their favorite worlds - without the adaptation compromises. --- ## 🐉 Be the Hero in Our Own Story While the prospect of experiencing our favorite worlds is exciting, the endless stream of remakes recycling the same characters and plots has created much fatigue. Stories need fresh settings, characters, and world mechanics - areas where AAA studios have been struggling. Smaller developers have stepped into this gap. Games like *Stardew Valley*, *Hollow Knight*, and *Outer Wilds* prove small teams can create rich worlds that rival AAA productions. The indie game market has been growing much faster year-over-year compared to AAA sales. Meanwhile, tabletop gaming has exploded, with D&D 5th Edition reaching 50 million players globally, and actual-play shows like *Critical Role* drawing millions of viewers and spawning multiple Prime Video animated adaptations. Creating compelling worlds remains the hardest part of game development. A medieval city of a million, a vast jungle of mysterious ruins, a galaxy of a trillion planets - these require time and resources most creators lack. Procedural generation helped *Minecraft* and *No Man's Sky* achieve scale, but at the cost of story depth. World models like Genie can help bridge this gap - the scale of procedural generation plus the allure of a captivating story, delivered at the speed of AI. With **Vibe Editing**, the world emerges before your eyes - mountains shift, cities grow, stars are born with a sentence. Tabletop Dungeon Masters plug their D&D campaign into an AI model and get a world where landscapes are generated on the fly and the Beholder's lair adapts to narration as the players battle. This eliminates physical constraints - you can keep rolling dice, but there's no need to print battle maps and move minis around anymore. --- ## 🔥 A Tale Worth Telling Studios will profit from IP-driven world models - immersive Lord of the Rings experiences, explorable Hogwarts, interactive Star Wars galaxies. But the same technology that enables corporations to mine established IP will democratize world-building for solo creators - provided it is affordable enough. Today, building a game world requires either a AAA budget or years of procedural system development. Soon, a storyteller with a vision might prototype their setting in an afternoon, iterate through natural conversation with an AI, and export a playable space. An indie developer could compete with the giants on imagination rather than pocket depth. We're not there just yet - persistence remains glitchy, costs are high, copyright questions loom. Once we've made enough progress on these issues, we can build on a foundation of procedural generation, combined with persistent world models and vibe-editing. The trajectory points toward a future where world-building becomes an act of storytelling once again, not an engineering problem. And when you have a tale worth telling - get some snacks ready, gather your friends and family, and sit comfortably around the living room screen. Like cavemen telling stories around the fire. ``` ### Effective Code Reviews - Markdown: https://vdsabev.github.io/effective-code-reviews.md - HTML: https://vdsabev.github.io/effective-code-reviews/ ```markdown --- status: "published" title: "Effective Code Reviews" date: "2023-09-26" description: "How to foster a culture of learning through code review." image: "https://github.com/user-attachments/assets/dfd49146-348f-4e86-a7c1-c2030ed57c89" imageAlt: "Photo by NESA by Makers on Unsplash" author: "Vlad Sabev" authorUrl: "https://github.com/vdsabev" authorAvatar: "https://github.com/vdsabev.png" tags: ["code review","software development","teamwork"] navigationIndex: 0 --- Photo by [NESA by Makers](https://unsplash.com/@nesabymakers?utm_source=medium&utm_medium=referral) on [Unsplash](https://unsplash.com/?utm_source=medium&utm_medium=referral) Don't want to read? Listen to this dude's video, it covers most of what I have to say: Or, since you're here already — read on. ## 💭 Which one are you? You might be one of these people: 1️⃣ You're sitting at your desk, your hair turning white while scrolling through your colleague **Alex**'s PR. You know, *that* **Alex**, the one who always shortens variable names to incomprehensible gibberish, writes zero tests, and copy-pastes 3 files with only a few lines changed instead of taking the time to write a scalable solution. Your fingers are itching to write a comment for each variable name using `camelCase` instead of `snake_case`, leave a scathing review, show everyone how it's done!!! 2️⃣ You've taken the time with your PR — added a link to the ticket, put some nice labels, even found a fun GIF! Then **Greg**, your lead engineer, leaves a review asking why you didn't "just do X". You could kindly tell **Greg** that X was the first thing you tried and it didn't work for a very good reason. But since **Greg** didn't ask politely you'll *snap at him* and *leave snarky comments* on his PRs from now on. *F-ing Greg!* Hey, he started it!! 3️⃣ Pull requests come and go. You just don't care to participate. What's all the fuss about anyway? The app seems to work. Code quality? That's just, like, your opinion, man 🤷♂️ 4️⃣ Your pull requests are a *pleasure to review*, you start discussions by asking *polite questions* out of *genuine curiosity*, you're *proactive* about *proposing alternatives*, and *open to changing your mind* while also knowing how to *stand your ground* on the things that matter. Recognize anyone you know? Maybe yourself? ## ✅ How to approach code reviews You might think reviewing code is about catching bugs. Surely that *is* the case sometimes. Yet is that all it's good for? > *🤔* But code review keeps our code clean, and clean code is good! If maintaining clean code was the entirety of software development I would wholeheartedly agree. Other important parts are *learning* and *maintaining good social relationships* within your team — does telling people to "do it *this way*" without first asking *why* they did it it *that way* really help with those? > *🤷♂️* It's just code, we shouldn't be that sensitive! If you don't want the people you work with to be *sensitive* does that mean you want them to be…*insensitive*? If you as a reviewer aren't willing to have an open and reasonable discussion on the best way to do something, but say *"just do it my way"* then who's really the one really being emotional about code? > *😔* Okay I'm listening. What are you suggesting instead? ### ✅ Do ask questions and start discussions Even the most experienced developers occasionally make mistakes or incorrect assumptions. They get tired, stressed out, or distracted. So is leaving a comment like this really the best way to go about it? > Extract this JSON to a separate file. **Ask, don't tell.** Instead of assuming the author was being lazy or didn't know what they were doing, try to find out what was really going on. *Caveat 1:* adding a question mark or *"maybe?"* after your statement does not make it a real question. *Caveat 2:* rephrasing your statement as *"why didn't you"* or worse — *"why didn't you* ***just****"* does make it a real question, but a negative one. How about turning it into a positive question? *"Have you considered"*, *"have you tried"*, *"how about"* (heeey — I used that one here), *"what would happen if"*, *"would this idea work?"* ### ✅ Do proactively propose solutions Look for related documentation, articles, video, code examples, codepens, performance tests, libraries, tools. When proposing a code change — open a real code editor and try to type it out yourself first — you might find it doesn't work out as well as you thought it would. ### ✅ Respect that accepting your solution is the author's decision Let people express their personal coding style now and then. Your project's code can look like it was written by the same super neat person and that's okay. But it's also okay if there's some personality in there as long as everyone can understand and work with it. **Alex** used a `for … of` loop instead of `.forEach`? What would happen if you let that slide and focused on whether the code does what it's supposed to? Here's how to address some situations. ## 1️⃣ When code works well but could use small improvements ### ❌ Rarely request code changes Requesting code changes (e.g. on GitHub) should be used sparingly, only as a last resort to warn other reviewers against merging obviously buggy code. While PR authors can choose to dismiss the blocking review and merge the changes anyway, reviewers might take that as an open act of disrespect. The red color in GitHub's UI indicating "something's wrong" doesn't help either:europe is not a real place pic.twitter.com/ykNOUcqumZ
— kitze 🛠️ tinkerer.club (@thekitze) February 4, 2026