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.
That makes a lot of sense, but right now, the editing seems to be completely absent, and, I suspect, most writers aren’t at your level (I am sure that I’m not).
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.
(I personally don’t use patches like this because “Lua 5.1” is something pretty standardized with a bunch of different implementations; e.g. I wrote my Lua book with a C# developer who was using the moonsharp Lua implementation)
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.
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.
Alcohol - stopped having an intoxicating effect on me. I feel a change in my balance and reaction time but there is almost no buzz or no buzz sometimes. alcohol used to always give me a buzz, feel silly, relaxed etc. if you look on pubmed there is some published research that notes this in their results. and if look online you can find personal accounts.
now it makes me feel a little anxious. it also gives me silent reflux feeling, which that i think already was there before as ive gotten older.
in short - before trying alcohol always made feel the same way - since trying that drug ive literally never felt that way from alcohol ever again. i never was much of a drinker only in college and a few years after. but even if you have wine at a guests house at dinner you can feel its effects quickly. thats just been completely gone ever since.
The way the 'male products' company promotes and manages this drug might as well be OTC. It is basically set and forget on their side with zero discussion/follow up about the risks.
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.
"after hormone levels return to baseline, there's no more pharmaceutical effect" Maybe no longer directly, but with one level of indirection there certainly _could_ be.
"no plausible mechanism of action" - I haven't looked into it to understand the mechanism of action for side effects from finasteride, but certainly if it can cause side effects during use, those could impact the body in a way that causes effects that persist past when usage stops.
Same with almost anything harmful that we do to our body - ideally the damage or effect is healed and we return to baseline, but very often we don't.
There could also be an effect where someone tried it, it didn't work as well as they wanted or it caused a side effect, and this was psychologically difficult to deal with and helped lead to depression and anxiety without that being directly chemically caused by the drug. And it would be fair to argue that that's not the drug's fault.
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.
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!
Well, we get those two letters "for free" anyway, and the phonemes are distinct in modern English, so let's use them!
"ð" also has the nice property of being sufficiently similar in looks to "d" that someone reading it and not familiar with the letter might pronounce it as "d" and thereby make a decent approximation. Unfortunately that's not the case with "þ" though. If we ignored the historical letters and instead just picked something reasonably sensible, I'd probably go with "đ" and "ŧ" for this reason.
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 ;)
> 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.
It's worth pointing out that you can absolutely use Rust without Cargo and crates.io and the culture that comes with.
You'll be swimming up against the stream. But arguably it makes sense for certain kinds of projects. I'd classify OS kernel and DB internals development as being those kinds of projects, TBH. Keep your dependency set extremely minimal, vendor it, and avoid crates.io entirely.
I don't actually run into nightly requirements... ever? These days.
> Maybe the whole DEI thing is a blessing in disguise because it points all the arbitrary rage on an abstract concept rather than specific groups of people.
They're still raging against specific groups of people, too. Immigrants and trans people have really been feeling it.
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.
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