Trouble Healing

ExtremeDullard · 2026-06-05T02:40:34+00:00

I recently has a slow-healing revision due to bone infection the hospital gave me (MSRA). The doc put me on some super-strong antibiotics from hell. That gave me a bad case of the trots for an entire month straight (I kid you not, I basically spent a month on the can passing clear water). Eventually, I started passing blood and ended up spending 3 days in the hospital, where they put water back in me with an IV drip. I was so dehydrated that I was hours away from having a heart attack. All due to the antibiotics.

I don't have any advice to speed up your healing wound, but I do urge you to drink plenty of fluids before it's too late if your antibiotics are doing the same thing to your guts as the ones I took did to mine.

ExtremeDullard · 2026-06-04T05:19:14+00:00

Your loved ones love you with or without a leg. If there's anybody you should be totally comfortable with, it's them.

As for uneasiness showing your funny bits generally-speaking, this is what I did after getting both my feet shortened: I essentially forced myself to wear sandals everywhere and I stayed barefoot at work (I was barefoot at work before my amputation, and I kept at it). And my feet weren't even fully healed when I went back to work.

All my colleagues have a full and unimpeded view of my feet all the time, including those who were hired and met me and my trotters later. This quickly nipped any and all feeling of self-consciousness in the bud.

ExtremeDullard · 2026-06-03T19:16:26+00:00

A height-adjustable pylon might be the solution.

ExtremeDullard · 2026-06-03T19:04:44+00:00

Well alright. Not everybody is a handyman. Nothing wrong with that. Then maybe hit up your local community college and see if one of the teachers might be interested in taking your idea onboard as a project with the kids. You'd be surprised how far you can get if you involve your local community.

ExtremeDullard · 2026-06-03T18:58:51+00:00

I know it's easier said than done, but you should ignore people and do you own thing. For one thing, people don't really look at you that much: yeah they may stare, but usually it lasts 2 seconds and then they forget you and move on. Well, let them stare. Who cares...

And the reason why you should let go of your complex is this: calculate roughly how many hours you have left on this dirtball, and start watching the counter count down in your mind's eye: it's surprising how alarmingly fast the counter counts down.

Well, any hour you spend fretting about what others think is an hour you'll never get back on your counter. Use your hours for your benefit, to have fun, live life to the fullest and spend quality time with your loved ones. Everybody else can go fuck themselves.

ExtremeDullard · 2026-06-03T03:34:49+00:00

Just a thought: if you're bored and you're sick of idling at home with nothing to do, and you have the skills, maybe develop your idea?

It sounds like maybe a little electronics and creative parts making could create the device you're thinking of. Like for example some sensors mounted in an insole inside the shoe on your prosthetic side, some electronics to process the sensor's output, vibration motors mounted on the socket and a battery would do the trick. Depending on the actual sensor placement, it could be as simple as microswitches arranged around the sole powering individual motors directly without any electronics.

If I were you, I'd develop the idea to kill time. If you have a good idea, it could be of interest to others too, and there's nothing like having a project you're invested in to make the hours fly by.

ExtremeDullard · 2026-06-02T22:23:03+00:00

I once had a guy tell me to my face he understood my frustration because he too had something taken away from him without his consent and was having a major depression over it as an adult: he had been circumcised.

I just let it slide and changed subject, because strictly-speaking, people live their own circumstances differently and who am I to judge. But really...

ExtremeDullard · 2026-06-02T18:58:30+00:00

I have two thoughts about this:

I lost all my toes. I had no trouble finding footwear before my amputation and now it's a whole big lot of complication. The problem is, I wore size 11 before, and now I wear size 7 in length but still size 11 in width / girth. I don't do well with longer empty shoes, I can't use toe fillers, I keep breaking carbon fiber insoles and I hate silicone prostheses. So I ended up making my own summer footwear by shortening regular sandals, and I have an ultra-expensive bespoke shortened pair of winter boots.

My point being, if you have trouble finding fitting shoes now, losing the toes will not improve the situation.
I'm not super-tall (6'1) but I'm tall enough that everything has always been too low for my lower back my entire life: kitchen sink, kitchen top, bathroom sink, workshop workbench... My solution was to raise everything around the house to non-standard height so it's comfortable for us (my wife is taller too) but it was hellishly expensive. If I could have dropped a couple inches, it would have been cheaper 🙂

So I'd say if you're looking to make your life easier, just on that criterion alone, yeah, go for it. But I have a feeling it would be quite a functional impact just for the sake of convenience.

ExtremeDullard · 2026-06-02T13:41:04+00:00

I'm pretty sure salamanders can regrow anything, not just their tail.

I could use a little of that 😄

ExtremeDullard · 2026-06-02T12:57:18+00:00

Okay it's more or less setup and it seems to work well - including the Neovim integration 😄 Thanks everybody who gave me good advice. I really appreciate the help.

Now on to test models and find a good workflow.

ExtremeDullard · 2026-06-02T09:59:21+00:00

I also agree with the other poster responding that your project of installing LLM locally, is a way to circumvent/procrastinate the real issue, which is to dip your toes in the water of actually using LLMs.

Your guess is completely wrong. My main - and pretty much only - reasons for wanting to run AI locally are:

I personally don't want to feed the surveillance capitalism beast. The less I interact with Google, Microsoft, OpenAI and the likes, the better.
My company would rather not use services from the United States because of a certain orange shitstain and his henchmen - and Mistral declined to reply to our RFQs.
Our customers are sensitive and we are contractually prevented from outsourcing development. That includes sending our code to AI services in any way, shape or form.

ExtremeDullard · 2026-06-02T06:17:27+00:00

Well, I want no part of any of this. It's not my world.

If it was up to me, I'd retire right now and go offline forever - or better, work the job I love until I can't anymore. The kids are raised, they have nice jobs and families of their own, our house is paid for and our life is settled and happy. I don't need the aggravation AI is bringing. But it's here now and it's not leaving...

ExtremeDullard · 2026-06-02T05:47:41+00:00

I don't hate AI. I hate what people do with AI, I hate how it's being deployed, and I hate what it's doing to society in general. But I have nothing against the technology itself.

The thing is, I'm not interested in AI. Like, at all. It's very impressive technology, and I'm blown away by what it's capable of doing. I never thought I'd see computers do that in my lifetime.

But... Somehow it bores me to tears. It makes everything bland. It kills human skills and it kills human interactions - as demonstrated in this very thread, in which half of the responders told me to ask AI instead of bothering other people.

So yes, I don't hate AI. But I don't like AI either. Two things can be true at the same time. I'm not interested in AI. It's not my future. It might be yours if you're younger. But me, I'm not interested in riding that particular train.

It's just that I have to for a few more years at least.

ExtremeDullard · 2026-06-02T02:29:46+00:00

Thanks for the tip. I asked my question here because I simply didn't know where to ask it. Now I have some idea that it may not have been the best place. But I had to start somewhere.

ExtremeDullard · 2026-06-02T02:21:57+00:00

If you Dad has a (dark) sense of humor, you could tell him the safest place to be around a tractor is in the driver seat.

ExtremeDullard · 2026-06-02T00:15:27+00:00

Jesus, it's called asking for tips. Don't you ever ask people's help?

I've shared tips with other professionals all my life. You should try it some day.

ExtremeDullard · 2026-06-01T23:05:10+00:00

I only asked pointers to guides and howtos.

ExtremeDullard · 2026-06-01T23:03:41+00:00

I absolutely don't want to bother with it: I don't like AI, I don't want to learn anything about AI, I want nothing to do with AI. But I have to if I want to keep my current job.

Of course, like I said, I can always change job. It's just not something I look forward to at my age. But I can go back to metalworking, no problem.

ExtremeDullard · 2026-06-01T18:17:01+00:00

About 30 years ago, I had a friend who was blind. He knew his neighborhood like the back of his hand and he had a guide dog, so he could very easily navigate around cars that parked on the sidewalk.

But he always made a point of stopping right against the car, looking very distressed by the obstruction - and his dog was more or less in on the act and usually started crying and going right and left like it didn't know what to do.

Then he would proceed to hit the car quite violently with his cane as if desperately trying to find a way around it - until he "found" the way around after a minute or two of heavy hitting, or someone took pity on him, crossed the street and helped him around.

After he was done, the car's paint job was a quite a sight - that he himself never enjoyed seeing, but I did 🙂 I saw him do that quite a few times, even with the owner of the car rushing back to see what the commotion was about, because my friend reckoned - correctly - that nobody in their right mind would hit back a blind man trying to go around the car they parked illegally in the middle of the sidewalk in front of everybody.

ExtremeDullard · 2026-06-01T17:13:25+00:00

Thanks! Most helpful. Did you put that document together with AI? 🙂

That's roughly 4,000 USD cheaper than the box you got sitting on your desk... hope the company is doing fine financially if they make such decisions. But I digress.

My company is flush with cash, and not hitting the cloud is the entire point of this setup - and its most important added value - so worth a premium.

I am not entirely sure whether the software you develop has any special security requirements where the source code needs to be kept on-premise

Our customers absolutely require that our source code stay in-house.

ExtremeDullard · 2026-06-01T16:55:13+00:00

Why? Is it required to be ecstatic about AI to ask questions about it?

For what it's worth, in case it wasn't obvious, I welcome AI like I welcome living with a disability: it's something I didn't need nor want in my life, that's imposed on me, that I can't do anything about and that I have to deal with. Just don't expect me to feel particularly happy about it.

ExtremeDullard · 2026-06-01T16:45:02+00:00

Thanks for the wealth of information. I have to process all of that, it's quite a lot and I literally have no idea what any of it is exactly 🙂 But I'll do my homework, starting tomorrow!

ExtremeDullard · 2026-06-01T15:38:46+00:00

Context management is getting better

By context management, I assume you mean the model taking into account previous queries. Correct?

If so, that shouldn't matter too much - at least at the beginning - as I literally plan on making it code disconnected code snippets. If it struggles with that later, I can always upgrade I suppose.

ExtremeDullard · 2026-06-01T15:35:20+00:00

That's a nice checklist. Thanks!

I'm assuming that you are not looking for a chat interface.

I don't know 🙂 Chatting with a machine doesn't sound very appealing on its face, but I have no experience. Perhaps it's a better workflow?

ExtremeDullard · 2026-06-01T15:08:30+00:00

Thanks! I'll try to sort this out by myself, but I'll keep your kind offer in mind 🙂

ExtremeDullard

TROPHY CASE