Hacker News: groovy2shoes

New comment by groovy2shoes in "Butterflies are in decline across North America, a look at the Western Monarch"

groovy2shoes — Mon, 27 Apr 2026 03:11:38 +0000

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.

New comment by groovy2shoes in "Desk for people who work at home with a cat"

groovy2shoes — Sun, 29 Mar 2026 03:36:09 +0000

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 ;)

New comment by groovy2shoes in "Desk for people who work at home with a cat"

groovy2shoes — Fri, 27 Mar 2026 18:47:42 +0000

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.

New comment by groovy2shoes in "LFortran compiles fpm"

groovy2shoes — Tue, 03 Mar 2026 15:07:52 +0000

"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.

New comment by groovy2shoes in "A new bill in New York would require disclaimers on AI-generated news content"

groovy2shoes — Sat, 07 Feb 2026 17:33:29 +0000

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

New comment by groovy2shoes in "Julia"

groovy2shoes — Tue, 03 Feb 2026 02:28:04 +0000

i liked this a lot. real Gene Wolfe vibes.

New comment by groovy2shoes in "To those who fired or didn't hire tech writers because of AI"

groovy2shoes — Thu, 15 Jan 2026 13:42:18 +0000

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.

New comment by groovy2shoes in "If you're going to vibe code, why not do it in C?"

groovy2shoes — Wed, 10 Dec 2025 10:48:36 +0000

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

New comment by groovy2shoes in "How I learned Vulkan and wrote a small game engine with it (2024)"

groovy2shoes — Sun, 23 Nov 2025 15:15:40 +0000

cf. yak shaving :)

New comment by groovy2shoes in "Analytical review of depression and suicidality from finasteride"

groovy2shoes — Tue, 07 Oct 2025 17:16:46 +0000

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.

New comment by groovy2shoes in "Analytical review of depression and suicidality from finasteride"

groovy2shoes — Tue, 07 Oct 2025 17:15:10 +0000

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.

New comment by groovy2shoes in "The evolution of Lua, continued [pdf]"

groovy2shoes — Tue, 07 Oct 2025 16:05:23 +0000

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.

New comment by groovy2shoes in "The evolution of Lua, continued [pdf]"

groovy2shoes — Tue, 07 Oct 2025 16:01:41 +0000

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

    function(x) return x; end

New comment by groovy2shoes in "The strangest letter of the alphabet: The rise and fall of yogh"

groovy2shoes — Tue, 07 Oct 2025 10:56:41 +0000

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 ;)

New comment by groovy2shoes in "Analytical review of depression and suicidality from finasteride"

groovy2shoes — Tue, 07 Oct 2025 05:02:26 +0000

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.

New comment by groovy2shoes in "Analytical review of depression and suicidality from finasteride"

groovy2shoes — Tue, 07 Oct 2025 04:53:23 +0000

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.

New comment by groovy2shoes in "The strangest letter of the alphabet: The rise and fall of yogh"

groovy2shoes — Sun, 05 Oct 2025 00:23:11 +0000

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 for the voiced sound (and a plain for the voiced /f/). i've seen at least one MS that used . in Latinized versions of OE names, it's not uncommon to see or , 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!

New comment by groovy2shoes in "Why we develop EloqDB mainly in C++"

groovy2shoes — Mon, 29 Sep 2025 13:59:07 +0000

> 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.

New comment by groovy2shoes in "Google Calendar removed events like Pride and BHM; retains Black Friday"

groovy2shoes — Tue, 11 Feb 2025 16:56:29 +0000

> 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.

New comment by groovy2shoes in "NIH hit with freezes on meetings, travel, communications, and hiring"

groovy2shoes — Thu, 23 Jan 2025 02:07:54 +0000

Poe's Law strikes again.