When I was about 11 years old, my best friend and I were playing during recess at school, and I was carrying him around on my back, presumably pretending to be a multipart attack robot. All of a sudden, my heart started hurting, and I collapsed to my knees, and the robot was no more. Every time I inhaled, it would feel like a spike was being driven into my heart, and my breathing got completely shallow. I was sure I was done for, when all of a sudden, after an exhale, it disappeared.
It wasn't until I was in my twenties that I learned this was called Precordial catch syndrome and it happens to most everyone. Every friend I've told about it was surprised, and also most knew the feeling.
I collected a growing list of strange things bodies do ever since. And now finally I made it into a little page for others to see:
I immediately looked up whether it had "piss shiver" and it did. It was disappointing when Cecil (Straight Dope) refused to investigate it.
(Don't suppose you'd include orgasmic quiver?)
Synesthesia is multifaceted. When I was a kid I used to feel a shape in my hand whenever I felt a certain emotion. That went away in my 20's. Later as an adult I guessed it was a kind of synesthesia.
Ooh this is the closest description I've heard to one odd thing I had which was a satisfying feeling associated with two specific thicknesses (one around the thickness of a school copy book, the other around the thickness of a school maths book). At some points it could be activated by thinking about the thickness but long gone now.
Also had 3 more complex emotions/feelings/states that were a blend of certain particular things, not always that connected. For example one was mostly a combination of memories of my grandad's past (he died before I was born), and the Ratchet and Clank level "Metropolis". Similarly, the actual feeling of these is now gone. Anyone else have something similar?
The closest I've heard to that was Brian Eno in his film talking about something similar he seemed to have growing up with the colour purple.
I used to have them as a kid, even long stretches that prevented me from sleeping. I don’t remember having hiccups in the last 15 years. It just stopped happening at some point.
They left out "autoheadslap", the sharp pain you get whenever anyone mentions Nvidia and you smack your forehead as you remember cancelling your massive buy order back when it was $110 and had not split yet!! It is often accompanied by uncontrolled twitching and repeatedly saying "fuuuuuuuuu" as you bite your tongue.
Very cool site! It's got some Claude-isms but they're not overwhelming which leads me to wonder: how did the author get the overall aesthetic to be so un-Claude-like?
Please point out the claudeisms, I want to clear them all.
V1 looked like complete Opus slop, but since I make many little sites all the time I can get it to undo a lot of them, one at a time. I just explicitly tell it the aesthetic to avoid per-element (like the famous left border), and eventually it looks okish.
Edit: Ah and for text, Standard Technical English is a good instruction to give it, but I also told it to be dry and technical, and no embelish or do storytelling. And some manual editing out of cringe stuff still after that.
I don't think you can fix the Claude tells without rewriting everything on your own - but I do read/write a lot for work, so I think about voice a lot. Here's a handful of sentences that I feel a human would not have used but which are common Claude constructions:
"the alarming ones that are harmless" - We don't put dependent clauses at the end of sentences like this except for unusual emphasis
'quietly' - overused by Claude
the entries here are the moments where the guesswork shows - same as first example
"none of this needs damage or disease" - Also would be written differently as a human. Just try saying some of these things aloud and you'll feel odd
People downvote me when I say we're back in the "Geocities era" / "indie web" of the 90's and 00's, but LLMs have enabled us to build cool side projects to completion and give them love.
This is 100% a good thing.
I love this website. It's fantastic. I don't care if it's AI. The world is better for it existing.
I agree that this is an example of interesting and good AI usage. The person who made it obviously put thought into it. Unfortunately a lot of vibe coded sites do not have that same level of care
People were already building cool side projects to completion and giving them love before AI.
You get downvoted for being weirdly ecstatic about AI "enabling" things that were already possible, while not caring about the human element that AI lacks.
People that say "things [...] were already possible" don't dream enough.
Maybe you were born a few decades too late. I feel I was born (a few decades?) too early.
I want the world with cures for cancer, holodecks, brain uploads, immortality, jet packs, surfing on Titan, etc.
I legitimately enjoy the future we're hurtling towards. It's the most exciting thing that has ever happened to our species. I hated the world where "Apple iPhones" were the pinnacle of human achievement.
We might be able to vibe engineer our own iPhones in a few years. That'll be fun.
The fact that people who couldn't program can now build utilities and automations for themselves is beyond remarkable.
And for those of us who can engineer, we're making 10x, 20x what we were before. I'm filling my life with all kinds of fun side projects, toys, games, utility software, automations. I don't look at libraries and software packages anymore - I just build what I need.
This is like 3D printing for software.
I've built my own SRS software, my own music library, my own project management software, several agents, a video editor, a few toy video games, home automation software ... and I've done this all in a month.
I am so excited about everything I'm going to be building. Time was a limit before. There is no limit now.
> FFS we've stood on the moon.
And we slept on that for nearly 60 years. We're about to build cities there. Finally.
>The fact that people who couldn't program can now build utilities and automations for themselves is beyond remarkable.
Learning to program has never been easier or more accessible. Being able to build a website has been accessible to non-techies for years. I'll admit using an AI is convenient but "beyond remarkable" is pushing it. If anything it's a bit of a tragedy. In exchange for that convenience people are buying into a closed, third party mass surveillance infrastructure generating code they can't understand, can't repair, can't edit or redistribute. From a FOSS point of view AI is objectively worse than what we had. And that's not even getting into the flood of slop and disinformation destroying the web.
>I've built my own SRS software, my own music library, my own project management software, several agents, a video editor, a few toy video games, home automation software ... and I've done this all in a month.
I can't imagine you needed all of this done within a month and couldn't find existing solutions for most of it. It seems more like you're addicted than being productive.
And I still don't see the line between you vibe-coding a productivity app something something holograms and brain uploads and surfing on Titan.
>And we slept on that for nearly 60 years. We're about to build cities there. Finally.
No, we aren't. We're no closer to than than we were 60 years ago. If you think Elon Musk is actually going to accomplish anything of the sort I think you're bound for disappointment.
When I see someone else jump or fall from a height, I sense the fall in the bottoms of my feet and my lower legs. I feel both the drop and the landing. It also happens if I approach a ledge or dropoff.
I keep being surprised at both which feelings are universal, as well as which aren't. I think I know the one your'e talking about but from being kicked in the balls... For jumping I might have experienced it playing video games and falling further than I expected.
An interesting story about the Photic Sneeze Reflex [0]:
it's one of the things that fighter pilots are screened for. The reasoning is that they can't have a pilot looking down and dark ground, look up to scan for enemy fighters and start sneezing.
Some people with the reflex can also have multiple sneezes in a row.
Sleep Paralysis is for sure my favorite oddity. I've not experienced it in 20 years and I miss it. It happened about once a year when I was young and into my early 20s. Mine often had weird noises and hallucinations and creatures floating around. The first few times it was rather scary but then I realized it was pretty neat. The trick I learned is to tell myself I just have to move my toe.
I've experienced it once or twice, and mine was the classic "can't move, malevolent presence just barely in the corner of your vision". Once, I think I was actually still half-asleep-ish, and trying to yell and my wife woke me up.
Definitely not pleasant, even when I'm rationally aware of what's going on.
I had it happen twice that I can remember. Once I hallucinated that I had a third arm that snaked around to my desk lamp, and just last night that someone whispered "hello" into my ear. Apparently that last one's pretty common.
Awesome site! I didn't find canaliths on it so I might submit it to you eventually: roughly every winter I get vertigo when lying down, and apparently there is no "fix" except to "reposition my canaliths"[1].
Another one I'm not sure how to fully explain: closing the nose without touching it.
I can fully block smells or breathing by doing something that feels like inflating a zone between the top of the mouth and the nose. When speaking it will sound as if I am pinching my nose without hands.
Comes in handy when having to face horrible smells.
I assume everybody can do it but many don't know how.
I'm not a diver but I suspect it can be learned. I have allergy issues that cause my ears to not equalize when allergies are hitting and I think I just learned how to do this. its just sort of muscle that can sort of be lightly controlled. Controlling one side vs the other I can't really manage.
Something not mentioned that I’m curious about, if I’m about to fall asleep and I happen to hear a loud noise nearby, I also see a flash of light with my closed eyelids.
Weird. A spike in blood pressure maybe? Can you do reproduce it consistently on purpose with an alarm or by holding something as you fall asleep that will make a loud noise when it falls?
This AI website has very weak sources for many pages.
As they said in school (and is still valid here) - Wikipedia is never to be your primary citation. This website commits the sins of citing Wikipedia and ONLY Wikipedia.
This is a really cool collection! I feel like it needs a manual once-over though, particularly in regard to the images. Having even a handful obviously wrong images makes the rest of the site feel less trustworthy.
I wonder about these sites that appear to be vibe coded from a simple prompt. Has the author even looked at the data or just did a little sample and figured that looks about right and hit publish
To either my credit or against it, wikipedia provides a lot of the raw data. However that makes you feel.
I've been making this list for years as markdown files with a few sentences and links to wikipedia (or xkcd for his visual field comic), but the site is indeed made with the help of AI.
I'm surprised it's so few! I'm in the 60-70% here -- I've never gotten it (despite many deliberate efforts), but I've never known anyone else who seems to be immune.
edit: and apparently AI-generated site layout too. Either it doesn't bother me as much as the writing, or I haven't seen enough examples, but I didn't notice that.
When I was about 11 years old, my best friend and I were playing during recess at school, and I was carrying him around on my back, presumably pretending to be a multipart attack robot. All of a sudden, my heart started hurting, and I collapsed to my knees, and the robot was no more. Every time I inhaled, it would feel like a spike was being driven into my heart, and my breathing got completely shallow. I was sure I was done for, when all of a sudden, after an exhale, it disappeared.
It wasn't until I was in my twenties that I learned this was called Precordial catch syndrome and it happens to most everyone. Every friend I've told about it was surprised, and also most knew the feeling.
I collected a growing list of strange things bodies do ever since. And now finally I made it into a little page for others to see:
https://vester.si/bodily-oddities/
It includes a form to tell me about new things, if you think they belong on the page. Feedback welcome!
I immediately looked up whether it had "piss shiver" and it did. It was disappointing when Cecil (Straight Dope) refused to investigate it.
(Don't suppose you'd include orgasmic quiver?)
Synesthesia is multifaceted. When I was a kid I used to feel a shape in my hand whenever I felt a certain emotion. That went away in my 20's. Later as an adult I guessed it was a kind of synesthesia.
Ooh this is the closest description I've heard to one odd thing I had which was a satisfying feeling associated with two specific thicknesses (one around the thickness of a school copy book, the other around the thickness of a school maths book). At some points it could be activated by thinking about the thickness but long gone now.
Also had 3 more complex emotions/feelings/states that were a blend of certain particular things, not always that connected. For example one was mostly a combination of memories of my grandad's past (he died before I was born), and the Ratchet and Clank level "Metropolis". Similarly, the actual feeling of these is now gone. Anyone else have something similar?
The closest I've heard to that was Brian Eno in his film talking about something similar he seemed to have growing up with the colour purple.
Do we have a theory yet why people hiccup? Wait, I just see you have a page on it :)
Not that I know of. But some people so far visiting the site have voted that they do no get hiccups, which is very odd.
I used to have them as a kid, even long stretches that prevented me from sleeping. I don’t remember having hiccups in the last 15 years. It just stopped happening at some point.
Have a friend who has never had a headache!
That is insane to me, as someone who suffers from chronic headaches every single day.
You should add "exploding head syndrome" which sounds crazy but is mostly "phantom loud noise especially as you're falling asleep"
It's there! :)
Is voluntary piloerection really that unusual? I thought everyone could give themselves goosebumps?
They left out "autoheadslap", the sharp pain you get whenever anyone mentions Nvidia and you smack your forehead as you remember cancelling your massive buy order back when it was $110 and had not split yet!! It is often accompanied by uncontrolled twitching and repeatedly saying "fuuuuuuuuu" as you bite your tongue.
Yes, a rare but real human affliction.
I remember choosing to not buy NVIDIA stock because Ethereum moved to proof of stake. Oops.
I remember waiting for that to buy a GPU.
Still waiting...
But just think of how many many things you could have bought with the same knowledge which would have been mediocre or failed entirely.
Very cool site! It's got some Claude-isms but they're not overwhelming which leads me to wonder: how did the author get the overall aesthetic to be so un-Claude-like?
Please point out the claudeisms, I want to clear them all.
V1 looked like complete Opus slop, but since I make many little sites all the time I can get it to undo a lot of them, one at a time. I just explicitly tell it the aesthetic to avoid per-element (like the famous left border), and eventually it looks okish.
Edit: Ah and for text, Standard Technical English is a good instruction to give it, but I also told it to be dry and technical, and no embelish or do storytelling. And some manual editing out of cringe stuff still after that.
I don't think you can fix the Claude tells without rewriting everything on your own - but I do read/write a lot for work, so I think about voice a lot. Here's a handful of sentences that I feel a human would not have used but which are common Claude constructions:
"the alarming ones that are harmless" - We don't put dependent clauses at the end of sentences like this except for unusual emphasis
'quietly' - overused by Claude
the entries here are the moments where the guesswork shows - same as first example
"none of this needs damage or disease" - Also would be written differently as a human. Just try saying some of these things aloud and you'll feel odd
'unknown. nobody has counted it'
People downvote me when I say we're back in the "Geocities era" / "indie web" of the 90's and 00's, but LLMs have enabled us to build cool side projects to completion and give them love.
This is 100% a good thing.
I love this website. It's fantastic. I don't care if it's AI. The world is better for it existing.
I agree that this is an example of interesting and good AI usage. The person who made it obviously put thought into it. Unfortunately a lot of vibe coded sites do not have that same level of care
What world are you living in where you’re okay with this?
Phoned in websites / AI slop is not a good thing.
Code something yourself on neocities.
This is not slop. It took effort. This is not a one shot fire and forget project.
People were already building cool side projects to completion and giving them love before AI.
You get downvoted for being weirdly ecstatic about AI "enabling" things that were already possible, while not caring about the human element that AI lacks.
People that say "things [...] were already possible" don't dream enough.
Maybe you were born a few decades too late. I feel I was born (a few decades?) too early.
I want the world with cures for cancer, holodecks, brain uploads, immortality, jet packs, surfing on Titan, etc.
I legitimately enjoy the future we're hurtling towards. It's the most exciting thing that has ever happened to our species. I hated the world where "Apple iPhones" were the pinnacle of human achievement.
We might be able to vibe engineer our own iPhones in a few years. That'll be fun.
But building a website like the one posted here was already possible. you compared it to the early "indie" web.
There is literally nothing about generating websites with AI that merits being called "the most exciting thing that has ever happened to our species."
FFS we've stood on the moon.
> was already possible.
The fact that people who couldn't program can now build utilities and automations for themselves is beyond remarkable.
And for those of us who can engineer, we're making 10x, 20x what we were before. I'm filling my life with all kinds of fun side projects, toys, games, utility software, automations. I don't look at libraries and software packages anymore - I just build what I need.
This is like 3D printing for software.
I've built my own SRS software, my own music library, my own project management software, several agents, a video editor, a few toy video games, home automation software ... and I've done this all in a month.
I am so excited about everything I'm going to be building. Time was a limit before. There is no limit now.
> FFS we've stood on the moon.
And we slept on that for nearly 60 years. We're about to build cities there. Finally.
>The fact that people who couldn't program can now build utilities and automations for themselves is beyond remarkable.
Learning to program has never been easier or more accessible. Being able to build a website has been accessible to non-techies for years. I'll admit using an AI is convenient but "beyond remarkable" is pushing it. If anything it's a bit of a tragedy. In exchange for that convenience people are buying into a closed, third party mass surveillance infrastructure generating code they can't understand, can't repair, can't edit or redistribute. From a FOSS point of view AI is objectively worse than what we had. And that's not even getting into the flood of slop and disinformation destroying the web.
>I've built my own SRS software, my own music library, my own project management software, several agents, a video editor, a few toy video games, home automation software ... and I've done this all in a month.
I can't imagine you needed all of this done within a month and couldn't find existing solutions for most of it. It seems more like you're addicted than being productive.
And I still don't see the line between you vibe-coding a productivity app something something holograms and brain uploads and surfing on Titan.
>And we slept on that for nearly 60 years. We're about to build cities there. Finally.
No, we aren't. We're no closer to than than we were 60 years ago. If you think Elon Musk is actually going to accomplish anything of the sort I think you're bound for disappointment.
When I see someone else jump or fall from a height, I sense the fall in the bottoms of my feet and my lower legs. I feel both the drop and the landing. It also happens if I approach a ledge or dropoff.
Lovely! I mean odd… I will look into it, thanks!
Is this not something everybody feels?
I keep being surprised at both which feelings are universal, as well as which aren't. I think I know the one your'e talking about but from being kicked in the balls... For jumping I might have experienced it playing video games and falling further than I expected.
An interesting story about the Photic Sneeze Reflex [0]:
it's one of the things that fighter pilots are screened for. The reasoning is that they can't have a pilot looking down and dark ground, look up to scan for enemy fighters and start sneezing.
Some people with the reflex can also have multiple sneezes in a row.
I find this all fascinating as:
- I have this
- I was also born with no sense of smell
0 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Photic_sneeze_reflex
Sleep Paralysis is for sure my favorite oddity. I've not experienced it in 20 years and I miss it. It happened about once a year when I was young and into my early 20s. Mine often had weird noises and hallucinations and creatures floating around. The first few times it was rather scary but then I realized it was pretty neat. The trick I learned is to tell myself I just have to move my toe.
I've experienced it once or twice, and mine was the classic "can't move, malevolent presence just barely in the corner of your vision". Once, I think I was actually still half-asleep-ish, and trying to yell and my wife woke me up.
Definitely not pleasant, even when I'm rationally aware of what's going on.
I had it happen twice that I can remember. Once I hallucinated that I had a third arm that snaked around to my desk lamp, and just last night that someone whispered "hello" into my ear. Apparently that last one's pretty common.
I've never seen the shadow man or anything.
Awesome site! I didn't find canaliths on it so I might submit it to you eventually: roughly every winter I get vertigo when lying down, and apparently there is no "fix" except to "reposition my canaliths"[1].
It all goes away during the summer somehow.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Epley_maneuver
If I understand correctly this is the same as BPPV which is on there :)
You're right! I brought BPPV was just all benign cases of vertigo regardless of origin but the article does mention tiny crystals, good catch!
Ah great! I'll put it on my list to read up on. Thanks
Another one I'm not sure how to fully explain: closing the nose without touching it.
I can fully block smells or breathing by doing something that feels like inflating a zone between the top of the mouth and the nose. When speaking it will sound as if I am pinching my nose without hands. Comes in handy when having to face horrible smells.
I assume everybody can do it but many don't know how.
https://www.reddit.com/r/TooAfraidToAsk/comments/ysd5o2/is_i...
Fascinating site! TIL the human eye can detect polarization of light (search for “Haidinger's brush”).
Rare but useless Voluntary tube opener here. Ask me anything.
https://vester.si/bodily-oddities/oddities/voluntary-eustach...
My friend who does free diving would kill to be able to do it! She can't learn it.
I'm not a diver but I suspect it can be learned. I have allergy issues that cause my ears to not equalize when allergies are hitting and I think I just learned how to do this. its just sort of muscle that can sort of be lightly controlled. Controlling one side vs the other I can't really manage.
I get brainzaps sometimes, even when I take my SSRIs daily and with no withdrawal
Something not mentioned that I’m curious about, if I’m about to fall asleep and I happen to hear a loud noise nearby, I also see a flash of light with my closed eyelids.
Weird. A spike in blood pressure maybe? Can you do reproduce it consistently on purpose with an alarm or by holding something as you fall asleep that will make a loud noise when it falls?
Yes, I have never tried to reproduce it on purpose, but it happens consistently enough that I would be surprised if it does not happen at this point.
It happens simultaneously with the sound, so I would guess it is purely a weird form of synesthetic hallucination.
How is supertasting considered "rare" if it is 25% of people? https://vester.si/bodily-oddities/kinds/rare-ability/
You're right, I moved it
This AI website has very weak sources for many pages.
As they said in school (and is still valid here) - Wikipedia is never to be your primary citation. This website commits the sins of citing Wikipedia and ONLY Wikipedia.
This is a really cool collection! I feel like it needs a manual once-over though, particularly in regard to the images. Having even a handful obviously wrong images makes the rest of the site feel less trustworthy.
I wonder about these sites that appear to be vibe coded from a simple prompt. Has the author even looked at the data or just did a little sample and figured that looks about right and hit publish
To either my credit or against it, wikipedia provides a lot of the raw data. However that makes you feel.
I've been making this list for years as markdown files with a few sentences and links to wikipedia (or xkcd for his visual field comic), but the site is indeed made with the help of AI.
Only 30-40% of people encounter brain freeze?
Fabulous site.
So it seems, it just happens to include everyone I've ever talked to about it
I'm surprised it's so few! I'm in the 60-70% here -- I've never gotten it (despite many deliberate efforts), but I've never known anyone else who seems to be immune.
I have to be so careful eating cold things, it's like freeze++, brain glaciation.
This is delightful! What a nice and wholesome resource.
Fascinating, but sadly LLM-assisted writing.
edit: and apparently AI-generated site layout too. Either it doesn't bother me as much as the writing, or I haven't seen enough examples, but I didn't notice that.
This should be taught in school.