groovy2shoes

9 hari yang laludiscuss

Leslie Lamport is also the original creator of LaTeX.

3 bulan yang laludiscuss

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.

groovy2shoes

4 bulan yang laludiscuss

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 ;)

groovy2shoes

4 bulan yang laludiscuss

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.

groovy2shoes

4 bulan yang laludiscuss

"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.

groovy2shoes

5 bulan yang laludiscuss

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

groovy2shoes

5 bulan yang laludiscuss

i liked this a lot. real Gene Wolfe vibes.

groovy2shoes

6 bulan yang laludiscuss

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

7 bulan yang laludiscuss

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

groovy2shoes

8 bulan yang laludiscuss

cf. yak shaving :)

groovy2shoes

9 bulan yang laludiscuss

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.

groovy2shoes

9 bulan yang laludiscuss

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

9 bulan yang laludiscuss

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

9 bulan yang laludiscuss

Lua has lambdas. They too suffer from verbosity, of course, but they're there.

    function(x) return x; end

groovy2shoes

9 bulan yang laludiscuss

i've had people mistake "ð" for an "o" with a diacritic, but presumably that's a typeface problem. whatever we choose, i insist that we drop the names and call them "eþþ" and "ðee", by analogy with our other fricatives ;)

groovy2shoes

9 bulan yang laludiscuss

the two drugs are complimentary and often prescribed together. finasteride is overwhelmingly well-tolerated, and i suspect that many reports of serious and lasting adverse reactions involve misattribution.

groovy2shoes

9 bulan yang laludiscuss

indeed, finasteride raised my T levels slightly, from 18 ng/dL to 30 ng/dL. the same enzyme that converts T to DHT (5α reductase) can also to convert progesterone to DHT via the backdoor pathway, but i reckon that would have a very small effect for most cis men (where normal progesterone levels range from 0.0-0.5 ng/mL, compared to 2.0-24.0 ng/mL in cis women during the luteal phase, and much higher during pregnancy).

a sudden hormonal change can absolutely cause changes to mood and libido, but with finasteride these seem to be rare and generally mild. i would expect them to lessen or even disappear after some time of continued treatment. i wonder how often finasteride is discontinued before the body even has a chance to adjust to the new hormone levels. the claims that the side effects persist after discontinuation are particularly dubious, and they remind me of castration anxiety.

groovy2shoes

9 bulan yang laludiscuss

i am inclined to agree on all points, and while the second parenthetical would be useful in Contemporary English, i cannot help but note that "þ" and "ð" in Old English both represented the same phoneme (unlike in, say, Icelandic). all of the OE fricatives (/s/, /f/, /þ/) had predictable phonetic voicing depending on environment (voiced intervocalically, unvoiced elsewhere), but no phonemic distinction. in extant MSS, <þ> and <ð> are completely interchangable, mere stylistic variants of writing the phoneme, and even texts written by a single scribe will often have the same word written with both letters. some older MSS will use a plain <d> for the voiced sound (and a plain <b> for the voiced /f/). i've seen at least one MS that used <th>. in Latinized versions of OE names, it's not uncommon to see <th> or <d>, but Classical OE spelling didn't generally distinguish the voiced or unvoiced.

even in Contemporary OE, there are very few minimal pairs between /þ/ and /ð/ ("thigh" vs. "thy" comes to mind, but not much else apart from rare noun/verb combos like "loath" vs. "loathe"). it could be argued that we don't really need both, but the (surely obvious by now) pedant in me desires both. saying "boð" rather than "boþ" doesn't strictly change the meaning, and is not likely to cause confusion, but it sure sounds off!

groovy2shoes

10 bulan yang laludiscuss

> the rather chaotic and unprofessional (and potentially insecure) nature of the way Cargo project dependencies explode into a hard-to-reason-about mess.

this is one of my biggest gripes, too. that alone has been enough to cause me to avoid Rust for projects wherefore it would otherwise be a good fit. you can pull in "one" dependency and find yourself downloading hundreds of gigabytes of zillions of tiny dependencies, sometimes the same one at multiple versions. it's by no means a problem exclusive to Rust, but that's no excuse.

it's been a while, but my other major gripe was the way so many crates would require the nightly. the rust devs have done a good job maintaining backward compatibility between stable releases, but afaik there isn't any guarantee regarding the nightly. keeping up with the nightly is infeasible when each compiler release and all your dependencies needs to be vetted by your security team.

i also long found myself disappointed by the lack of a real specification, but that one is relatively minor. less of a frustration.

groovy2shoes

10 tahun yang laludiscuss

I use awesome, and there's a way you can assign particular programs to specific tags, so that they always open on that tag. I'd be surprised if i3 didn't have a way to do the same, given that even dwm can do it ;)

Then, there's a third option in addition to the two you mentioned: spend two minutes (if that) doing the one-time configuration of having the wm reserve a tag for your browser (and perhaps other GUI apps that you anticipate frequently needing/wanting to run full-screen). In awesome, you'd do that by adding an entry to your global rules table like this one (in rc.lua):

    { rule = {
        instance = "firefox"
      },
      properties = {
        screen = "HDMI1",
        tag = "3"
      }
    }

Which will configure awesome so that any time a new client becomes managed by the wm, it will ensure that its window opens on the XRandR screen "HDMI1", and specifically on that screen's tag "3". ("3" is a string here because, while tags are by default "integers", "1" - "9", they can be named by any string afaik, and many people will rename them things like "www", "irc", "term", etc.).

You can also use awesome-client(1) to send Lua code to a running awesome instance for execution within the wm's context. This could be tossed into a shell script (and parameterized as you see fit) for convenience, if desired:

    $ awesome-client <<EOF
      require("awful").spawn("firefox", {
        screen = mouse.screen,
        tag = "3",
        switchtotag = true
      })
    EOF

The same awful.spawn() call you'd send to awesome-client can also be bound to a keystroke or a menu entry for quick access.

As for me, I tend to only use tmux under X11 if I'm worried about losing an ssh connection and therefore (without tmux, of course) the ssh session. However, I have DEC vt520 glass TTY that connects via RS-232 serial cable to a couple of servers (one OpenBSD, the other FreeBSD) and, while the terminal is pretty damn featureful, it has limited scrollback and awkward copy/paste functionality. So, on that terminal I use tmux quite a bit (although it seems to be rather chatty and during periods of heavy pty traffic can sometimes wind up spitting a garbage glyph on the screen here and there, but I think I may just need to increase the baud rate (despite already being set to ~56 Kbaud! cha-tty!)). The vt520 also only supports 2 sessions at once directly (and I can't even figure out how to get the OS to recognize the second one -_-), so tmux's multiplexing capability is also greatly appreciated when I'm basking in the amber glow.

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