ksenzee

I don’t know whether you wrote this by hand in the most painfully LLM style you could gin up, or whether you got an LLM to do it for you, but either way I tip my hat to you.

Oh sorry, I didn’t mean to imply you didn’t. If you were lucky enough to get a doctor to diagnose you before you figured it out yourself, congrats. That should be more common than it is. There are way too many doctors out there brushing off obvious signs of small fiber neuropathy.

Not OP, but this is fairly common knowledge. Here's a reliable source - search the page for VAPP: https://www.chop.edu/vaccine-education-center/vaccine-detail...

Autonomic neurologists are the relevant specialists. I invite you to look for one in your local area and see how rare they are. The last I checked, the Seattle metro area (and in fact the whole state of Washington) had precisely one board-certified autonomic neurologist. Diagnostic delay is, unsurprisingly, around six years. Combine that with the fact that all the equipment you need to do a basic POTS test is a pulse oximeter and a blood pressure cuff, and yeah, you're going to have people self-diagnosing, for good reason.

I read novels voraciously, all of them on my phone. I haven't bought a paper book for myself in maybe a decade.

As someone with a degree in literature, I'm gonna disagree there. It depends on both the novel and the programming.

All of those may be correlated to the rise in obesity. I see no evidence that any of them is causal. I don't even think all of them are correlated, honestly. The rise in the number of calories available certainly is, but cars and suburbs have been around longer than that. And the rise in calories may just be a response to increased demand.

What evidence do you have that it is a cultural shift, rather than, say, a chemical in the environment that wasn't there before, or a difference in the food supply?

The word you're looking for is "sterilizing."

If you're not vegetarian, I recommend looking into heme iron. It's a lot more bioavailable, even more than iron bisglycinate, and in my experience it's much easier on the GI tract.

Yes, exactly. I don't object; it's salutary to find out you don't know anything about topic X. It's just disconcerting after having read and understood an article purporting to explain topic X.

Do you mean “simpler” or do you mean “more accurate”? I’m quite willing to accept your explanation as more accurate, but it is not simpler, at least if you don’t know much about modern cryptography. To understand the article, all I needed was some algebra. I think my 13-year-old could mostly get it. To try to understand your second paragraph here, I’ve spent about fifteen minutes so far looking things up (starting with the definition of “block cipher” and ending somewhere about halfway through the Wikipedia article on AES) and I have a sense of its meaning in the abstract, but if there’s a quiz tomorrow I’m in trouble.

If you really were going for “simpler” rather than “more accurate” then I regret to inform you that you have joined the “monoid in the category of endofunctors” guy in room 2501 of the xkcd building.

I read and understood the article, including the math in it, then came here (I know, that’s the wrong order) and read your comment, and promptly decided I knew less than I did before I started. It was very much like learning to use a monad in Haskell without knowing category theory, and then reading an article about them. Just because you understand an article written for the educated general public doesn’t mean you have the vocabulary to understand experts speaking to other experts.

just to understand block ciphers

I have a decent intuition for what a hash function does after twenty years of encountering them in the wild. I don't even know what a block cipher is. I understand hash functions less after reading this than I did before. My conclusion is that a hash function is just a block cipher in the category of endofunctors.

I disagree with most of this. I'm kicking and screaming pretty hard, and yet I'm not one of the "I can do it better" folks. My whole career has been in open source. I'm all about choosing the right tool. I'm also tech lead on a team of seven, so I'm not writing a lot of code anyway. What I am doing all day is sending AI-generated code back to be rewritten, rethought, re-architected. I'm starting to think we would get more done if nobody on my team used Copilot.

Yes, until everyone gets it through their head.

There's a reason AI uses things like em dashes and parallel structure and groups of three (catch me doing it here too). It's good writing. (Also varied sentence length.) AI trained on good writing uses the outward structure of good writing.

Have they been removed? I’m mostly seeing comments from established accounts.

It sure makes debugging headers a pain. curl -sLIXGET https://… never mind, that won’t work, _fires up browser yet again_

Hm. Well, congratulations on being the first man to mansplain menstruation to me. Somebody already knocked out breastfeeding years ago. Pregnancy is still up for grabs, if any men out there want to take a whack at telling me what that's like.

I appreciate that you've educated yourself about these issues, but let me assure you from decades of personal experience and conversations with other women that it is useful to be notified when your period is going to start.

I'm not sure I understand your argument. It's important enough that she has it set up to share that data to both of you, but it's so unimportant she doesn't need a notification for it?

This is a strawman argument. Nobody is arguing that period apps are a necessity. Women have been tracking our periods without computers since prehistoric times. Women were doing rocket science calculations before computers, for that matter. Of course we can do without period apps. But they're more useful than any other health tracking device or app that I can think of.

I've never used Flo specifically, so I don't know what kind of data analysis it has available, but period data is the #1 most useful health data to have an app crunch for you, and "your period starts tomorrow" is a pretty darn useful notification to get.

There's a big difference between learning to program a calculator, which is deterministic, and "learning" to prompt an LLM-based AI service that is tuned deliberately to be non-deterministic and that changes every few months. I would prefer my kids learn things like thinking critically and communicating and logic, not spend their time "chatting" with an unpredictable oracle.

That’s not what’s being described here. What OP described is the much more common situation where employees use a personal phone for MFA. Sure, some places issue hardware dongles and disallow authenticator apps on your personal phone, but IME most places default to just having people use their phone.

It's not like working with AI is pure Yes-clicking review dread; there is joy to be found in materialising your ideas out of thin air

I think that's true for some developers, and not for others. My guess is that one subset of developers has more ideas than they have time/resources to implement, and they enjoy programming because they love seeing the finished product emerge. I think this subset is more likely to go into management, because it's a force multiplier for them. They're the ones getting joy out of seeing AI make their ideas into reality.

But there's another subset who enjoys programming not because they love to see a product emerge, but because they enjoy the process itself: the head-scratching, the getting past "why won't this work" to the moment when the build starts working again or the site comes back up or the UI snaps into place. It's the magic of finding, among all the possible wrong answers, the exact right combination of bits that solve the problem. This subset is not getting any joy from AI: they're seeing AI take away that whole process and turn it into the kind of work their managers and their project owners do. It's made even worse because their managers don't even understand why they're so unhappy. I think managers would do well to consider how they're going to keep these folks happy and engaged and productive, because they're the ones who are going to be fixing the production bugs introduced by their teammates' AI commits. If they've all gone off to retrain as electricians, we're going to have a problem as an industry.

They were teaching us that in the 1980s, yes, but it was an overcorrection. They also taught us not to split our infinitives. That was BS as well. I see no need to maintain standards that were originally imposed by grammarians who undervalued English and overvalued Latin. These days we would call that linguistic insecurity.

This isn't how I read his conclusion. He's saying English will be different in fifty years, but he's not saying it'll be unrecognizable. Look how little difference there is between the 1900 passage and the 2000 passage.

This is true through 1300 or so. If you transliterate the 1200, 1100, and 1000 sections to modern glyphs, it's still a foreign language with the occasional recognizable word (such as "the"). Learning Old English in college was a lot like learning Latin: lots of recognizable vocabulary, totally unfamiliar case endings, mostly unfamiliar pronouns, arbitrary word order.