groovy2shoes

Audacious doesn't count?

Leslie Lamport is also the original creator of LaTeX.

i had a salesman say he noticed i had a lot of spiders around outside. he asked who i currently use for pest control. i said, "the spiders." he excused himself and left.

maybe they don't make great decorations, but the spiders generally stay in their webs and don't bother me. i once watched one defeat a wasp twice its size. i might feel differently if we had any dangerous spiders around here (just black widows, and they stay in dark hidey holes), but i'm happy to trade a little space for their services.

awesome, thank you! i'm not surprised there are more of these. i may be a little surprised i don't see them more often ;)

i came across a manuscript once that had a bunch of inky paw prints across a page. the scribe clearly tried to blot one of them, merely smudging it, then decided to let the rest be. it was in a very beautiful hand, and the full page must've taken hours to write. that scribe's exasperation echoes through the ages. i wish i could find that MS again.

to be fair, the page was probably arranged in a nice sunny spot at the time of the incident.

"deck" is the fairly normal word throughout the EDA industry. i reckon it's because such things used to be literal decks of punchcards, but i know less about EDA history than programming history.

"Good prices, no rats! That's the Fairsley Difference™!"

i liked this a lot. real Gene Wolfe vibes.

as a writer, i have found AI editing tools to be woefully unhelpful. they tend to focus on specific usage guidelines (think Strunk & White) and have little to offer for other, far more important aspects of writing.

i wrote a 5 page essay in November. the AI editor had sixty-something recommendations, and i accepted exactly one of them. it was a suggestion to hyphenate the adjectival phrase "25-year-old". i doubt that it had any measurable impact on the effectiveness of the essay.

thing is, i know all the elements of style. i know proper grammar and accepted orthographic conventions. i have read and followed many different style guides. i could best any English teacher at that game. when i violate the principles (and i do it often), i do so deliberately and intentionally. i spent a lot of time going through suggestions that would only genericize my writing. it was a huge waste of my time.

i asked a friend to read it and got some very excellent suggestions: remove a digressive paragraph, rephrase a few things for persuasive effect, and clarify a sentence. i took all of these suggestions, and the essay was markedly improved. i'm skeptical that an LLM will ever have such a grasp of the emotional and persuasive strength of a text to make recommendations like that.

the anxiety that i might fry my monitor by setting the wrong scan rate haunts me to this day

cf. yak shaving :)

i'm very sorry to hear that. if you care to elaborate, i am curious. if you don't care to elaborate, that's fine too.

persistence of symptoms after discontinuation is the big one. after hormone levels return to baseline, there's no more pharmaceutical effect. thus the cause of those symptoms is unlikely to be pharmaceutical.

it's worth noting that candidates for finasteride treatment are already likely to be older and dealing with comorbidities like depression and anxiety, which makes it harder to say for sure if it's the drug in a lot of cases, but they do seem slightly higher than placebo. it is not surprising that a sudden change in hormone levels would cause a noticeable change in mood or sexual function, but there is usually improvement with continued treatment as levels stabilize.

for persistent effects, really there isn't a lot of reliable data to go on, and no plausible mechanism of action. we have a handful of anecdotal reports and some armchair hypotheses.

i'm happy to be proven wrong, and lots of drugs are indeed implicated in serious and lasting side effects, but in the case of finasteride i'm not convinced.

The Lua-C API is also really consistent and straightforward. Bindings can be generated mechanically, of course, but it's really easy to embed by hand, and the documentation is superb.