Imagine selling a product with the tagline: "Unlike Pepsi, ours doesn't cause cancer."
"Good prices, no rats! That's the Fairsley Difference™!"
Readit Newsi liked this a lot. real Gene Wolfe vibes.
groovy2shoes commented on To those who fired or didn't hire tech writers because of AI passo.uno/letter-those-wh... · Posted by u/theletterf
Good points.
I suspect a lot of folks are asking ChatGPT to summarize it…
I can’t imagine just letting an LLM write an app, server, or documentation package, wholesale and unsupervised, but have found them to be extremely helpful in editing and writing portions of a whole.
The one thing that could be a light in the darkness, is that publishers have already fired all their editors (nothing to do with AI), and the writing out there shows it. This means there’s the possibility that AI could bring back editing.
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.
groovy2shoes commented on If you're going to vibe code, why not do it in C? stephenramsay.net/posts/v... · Posted by u/sramsay
38 there. If you didn't suffer Win9x's 'stability', then editing X11 config files by hand, getting mad with ALSA/Dmix, writing new ad-hoc drivers for weird BTTV tuners reusing old known ones for $WEIRDBRAND, you didn't live.
the anxiety that i might fry my monitor by setting the wrong scan rate haunts me to this day
groovy2shoes commented on How I learned Vulkan and wrote a small game engine with it (2024) edw.is/learning-vulkan/... · Posted by u/jakogut
The author could also have used the phrase "hobby horsing", which is similar to bike shedding in that the individual is focusing on things that don't really push the project forward, but which rather give them personal pleasure, instead. Bike shedding usually is explained as "working out what color to paint the bike shed before the rest of the house is done".
cf. yak shaving :)
I took it and it was the absolute worst, with side effects that have lingered since and some changes in my body that probably now permanent. I can tell you for this drug if you were in the small unlucky camp it can absolutely ruin you. I can assure you it is NOT misattribution.
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.
What's your basis for suspecting that?
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.
groovy2shoes commented on The evolution of Lua, continued [pdf] lua.org/doc/cola.pdf... · Posted by u/welovebunnies
A useful design pattern is to write highly efficient "engine" code in C/C++ and then tie it together to highly customizable application code with an embedded scripting language.
Lua is great for this, and while you could use a LISP (Emacs, AutoCad) or a FORTH (any real-life example not from the radio telescope domain?) or Tcl/Tk (https://wiki.tcl-lang.org/page/Who+Uses+Tcl), Lua is small (as in number of concepts to understand), easy to read and understand, and compact (as in tiny codebase to integrate, few dependencies).
So many gaming startups have put their money on Lua.
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.
groovy2shoes commented on The evolution of Lua, continued [pdf] lua.org/doc/cola.pdf... · Posted by u/welovebunnies
I always wrote Lua off, scoffing at the 1-based indexing, until I was "forced" to learn it thanks to Neovim. What a delightful little language it is. I do wish I could do certain things less verbosely (lambdas would be nice) -- but then again, I defeat myself by suggesting it, because not having all the features makes Lua so approachable.
Lua has lambdas. They too suffer from verbosity, of course, but they're there.
function(x) return x; end
https://ngspice.sourceforge.io/docs/ngspice-manual.pdf