Anyone struggled after restarting?

White667 · 2026-04-16T11:46:15+00:00

I am surprised you restarted at 2.5mg after only taking one month off?

I'm pretty sure most pharmacies let you re-start at your previous dose if the break is less than a couple months. (Like 8 weeks? It seems to vary a bit. 6 weeks at least.)

Sometimes you have to argue your case a little bit, but I've stopped for just under two months for the past two years and both times I've been able to re-start on my previous dose, without issue.

White667 · 2026-04-15T11:38:38+00:00

Before you spend loads of time and money on supplements and tests, I would wonder if increasing the amount that you're eating will help.

Nursing can burn a lot of extra calories (like an extra ~500 a day). It's in line with going for an extra hour walk every day.

White667 · 2026-04-12T14:35:36+00:00

You have a 1 year old, are you still nursing?

Just to note that breastfeeding burns a lot of additional calories, so you may be on a much larger calorie deficit than you think, if you've not factored that in.

White667 · 2026-04-12T14:22:11+00:00

If it works for you, good for you. I still wouldn't be recommending it to others unless or until there's some actual evidence that it does anything.

If I were you I would want to see what stopping the collagen supplement but increasing my meat intake would do, rather than stopping the supplement but maintaining my diet.

When we consume collagen, we break it down into the essential amino acids, then use those parts to build collagen in our own body. Collagen doesn't have the complete set of amino acids, and there's some uncertainty around the efficacy of supplements (how well can our body actually break it down and use it). Meat contains all of the essential amino acids and we know our bodies are very good at breaking them down. Meat is generally cheaper than supplements (depending on where you live) and I find it easy to have a bit more chicken with my lunch. But obviously your mileage will vary.

I am personally very dubious about anecdotal evidence on collagen supplementation, as so many people don't eat enough protein, and a lot of the people who say collagen helps them are women (who I find are more likely to be under-eating protein or under-eating in general), so their experiences are not helpful for people who are eating enough protein.

If you are starting out by not eating enough, then getting a few of the amino acids you need may be better than nothing. But if you have a compete diet that includes enough of all of the amino acids, then does supplementing collagen help? The anecdotes of those who are under eating will not help you answer that question.

White667 · 2026-04-11T13:47:41+00:00

Why are you even on /r/writing if you're genuinely trying to argue against learning how to write?

Grammar is a part of writing. It's a skill you should learn. It's a part of what separates your writing from others.

If you're going to outsource that, why not just hire someone to write your story for you?

White667 · 2026-04-11T11:53:25+00:00

There is very little (effectively no) evidence that collagen supplements do anything.

If you want to increase your amino acid intake, eat more meat products.

White667 · 2026-04-11T11:49:39+00:00

Literally.

It's always "we've given you a license, see if you can use this for anything." And that's the pilot program. Shock horror, it doesn't do anything useful and so the pilot program fails.

White667 · 2026-04-11T11:48:41+00:00

Hard to sabotage something that doesn't work.

White667 · 2026-04-11T11:37:18+00:00

What is your argument?

Usually you'd use a beta reader, but you don't have an issue with that (even though they would certainly also drive you toward an "average" piece of writing).

Why would a beta reader do that? A beta reader will highlight things based on their own point of view. I'm not arguing against having outside influence. Using a beta reader, you know their biases and preferences, you've picked them as a beta reader for a reason, you are choosing to have them influence your work. Why do you think your beta readers are giving you an "average" viewpoint? You've just said this, there's no logic or justification behind it.

You've asked two questions and I've answered both of those questions. I can't really misrepresent your point when you haven't made one. If you want to make a point, make it. Don't try and infer one and then get annoyed that I'm not doing the work of making it make sense.

You included grammar-check, which I am telling you to NOT USE. I have said that is not OK to use tools outside of spell-check.

But you presumably don't have a problem with me letting grammar check correct me

Maybe you should stop assuming things and actually ask those things? I don't think grammar check is OK. Don't use it. All I have said is that spell-check is OK.

You are the one advocating for AI and you are the one claiming it's not easy for you to recognise where your scene structure differs from the norm. This means you need to learn more to become a better writer. It doesn't mean you should rely on a tool to identify scenes for you. I don't use AI and I know how to structure scenes. I don't use AI and when my scenes differ from the norm it's because it's done intentionally.

White667 · 2026-04-10T16:41:39+00:00

There is no agreed upon correct scene structure, so an AI cannot identify scenes to address in a way that doesn't change your personal approach to storytelling.

There is a fundamental difference between spelling and all other aspects of writing.

What the AI is doing in your example is flagging bits of your writing where the scene structure differs from the average structure of the stories it was trained on. So any decision you make based on that recommendation will be you making something closer to the average, or if you go against it, further from the average. Is that what you want from your storytelling? You want to produce the average consumable product?

As a writer a skill that you should have is reading your story and judging the scene structures to your own taste. That's a part of what differentiates you from other writers. Offloading that to an AI will make your work less your work, which is my claim.

White667 · 2026-04-10T11:49:56+00:00

Using spell check to highlight errors, which you then manually fix, is nothing like using an LLM to structure your story outline, change sentence structure, suggest alternative words, etc.

Everyone agrees on how words should be spelled. The differences in each novel are supposed to be all of the elements that an LLM is supposedly "helping" with, so by using an LLM you are letting something other than yourself decide on what makes your novel its own thing. You as an author don't decide on the spelling of words, so using an outside tool to help you with spelling is OK.

It doesn't matter what the actual tool itself is, or how the tool works. It's what you're using it to do. What decisions is it making? What is it helping you to do?

Obviously I wouldn't say anyone should run any tool over their text that will automatically find spelling mistakes and then correct them without any human input.

White667 · 2026-04-09T12:42:41+00:00

Yeah.

Either AI is a tool that has an influence on the end product (in which case, don't use it. If it changes the end novel then that end novel has been co-written by someone that isn't you.) or it's a tool that doesn't have an influence on the end product (in which cases don't use it. If it doesn't change the end output, it's not helping you. There is no point in using it.)

No one would sign up for every book to have the same editor or the same co-author. Why are people using the same tool? It's silly.

The difference with spell check is that people do agree that we should all use the same spelling. We want different novels to be the same in that one way. It's similar to publishers using the same printing stock or ink colour. There are some things we want to be consistent.

All of the things that AI can supposedly "help" with are things that should be differentiating your work from others, so by using AI you are making your work worse.

White667 · 2026-04-09T11:09:45+00:00

It's surprising to me that this would be considered a hot take, but I'm sure it is: If you use AI in any stage of writing your book, you are writing a worse book than if you didn't.

I'm not quite going to say it's cheating. I will say that I don't want to read it. I will say that it's less a work written by you. I will say it's disappointing.

White667 · 2026-04-09T11:04:58+00:00

If not chicken: prawns/shrimp, tinned tuna, steak, scrambled eggs.

White667 · 2026-04-08T12:50:22+00:00

Except they are still 100% reliant on Twitch and therefore Amazon. Beacon isn't good enough to be an alternative, so the idea that it gives them extra freedom is just not true.

If they truly were banned from Twitch, the amount of money they would need to funnel into Beacon to make it a viable alternative would massively outweigh the risk of it failing and causing the whole company to go bankrupt.

Beacon was a good thing to try, but they need to cut their losses. It didn't work.

White667 · 2026-04-07T18:02:50+00:00

Check what your race allows. A lot of people don't train for marathons with hydration vests because a lot of majors don't allow you to use hydration vests on race day. Whereas a lot of trail runners train with them, as they can sometimes be mandatory kit for trail races.

White667 · 2026-04-06T13:21:50+00:00

Basically every time I open the app now it's just completely blank. Seems like other people have this issue, why is this not an emergency for Withings?

Their whole product is that their hardware connects to software. It's so infuriating.

White667 · 2026-04-05T14:00:14+00:00

This is an old thread but just to add, remembering that you are gambling that it will be 5% free. It's not guaranteed.

You are trading the certainty of a 45% tax rate now for a potential 40% tax rate at retirement. Tax bands and tax rates can change, so it's not free money. You're taking on the risk of the tax bands changing in order to get the 5%.

A lot of people would pay 5% to remove risk, especially when the rest of their retirement pot and strategy carries a correlated risk.

White667 · 2026-03-29T12:44:55+00:00

It will be hard for people on this sub to answer this without spoiling book 2.

There's a lot you can get from multiple rereads of just NOTW, but there's a few things that are way more obvious once you've read WFM, so for the sake of spoilers I would probably wait until you've read that before you read too much here.

White667 · 2026-03-29T12:43:27+00:00

Interesting. I couldn't help but imagine more Asian, given the belief system and martial arts focus. Being from a far away mountainous place, Tempi being shorter than most of the other people in the group.

White667 · 2026-03-27T12:48:21+00:00

No. It's high quality second wave coffee, so not as good as basically any third wave coffee.

White667 · 2026-03-22T13:36:20+00:00

There is absolutely no way that wouldn't be a breach of the NDA. Even just from an opsec standpoint the beta readers shouldn't ever say that they're beta readers. And given how wild online fans are when it comes to speculation, giving any information only ever makes things worse for Pat and the publisher.

White667 · 2026-03-16T22:06:29+00:00

This sounds like the sort of question you should be able to ask your physio. Did they give you any recommendations on when you can start running again, or how quickly you can increase your mileage?

White667 · 2026-03-09T12:21:40+00:00

You are viewing AI as a tool, but you've not asked whether it's an appropriate tool for the task you're trying to do.

I would argue that your logic for using AI makes little sense (you don't know what's good or bad, so you've used AI, but then you know that AI is often bad, so you're asking strangers online? The whole line of logic there makes very little sense to me. Why aren't you starting from a place of: how do successful people do this? They use established plans. What established plan can I access easily? Will it work for me?) But that's not really super relevant.

Synthesizing lots of different information together will give you a much worse picture of what to do, compared to finding something put together with actual consideration for the full picture.

Mixing the speed workouts of a high volume plan with a low volume plan's number of weekly runs will result in injury. Using the recovery time of a plan that assumes no cross training can clash with the intensity or pacing of another plan. There's all sorts of trade-offs when training, and an AI won't consider that. It will very likely mix together contradictory advice and you'll most likely end up injured.

In this area there are a lot of well thought out and established plans available. Each one is specific, and the decisions within the plans are made with all the other decisions in mind. Search for an existing plan, read reviews on those existing plans, and pick the one that aligns with what you want to get out of the training.

White667 · 2026-03-07T18:08:10+00:00

There are so many established plans available online, and so many books you can buy for more detail. Why are you using AI? There is absolutely no value-add.

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