Howdy folks, long time no see.
It's been a year and three months since I have been experiencing pain in my hands. Lots of diagnostic tests and I still don't have an actual diagnosis. The conclusion seems to be that it's most likely diabetes-induced small fiber neuropathy. It's weird though, as I have symptoms that I don't really find much evidence of on the internet being caused by small fiber neuropathy. Like when I use my thumbs, I experience pain in the base of the joints. Small fiber neuropathy typically causes sensitivity in your fingertips and burning or shooting pains if the damage is quite severe. But as far as I understand it, joint pain is quite unusual. I can't really find many people talking about it. But I've had x-rays, and I've had an ultrasound on every joint in my hand. They couldn't find anything actually wrong with the muscles, bones, or joints. So, I guess it probably is some kind of weird, rare nerve damage.
So yeah, that sucks. It took me a solid year to get my head around it and accept it, and then try to move on with my life. I was worried it might cost me my job, as that would mean I'd never be able to buy a house. All that stuff which was quite depressing felt like this problem had put my entire life on hold. But I've read a book on chronic pain management and how to be positive. I've learned how to make it through day-to-day life and achieve things. The book taught me to have a positive attitude and focus on my accomplishments rather than my failures. My default mental attitude for everything in life is to be cynical and expect the worst. It was quite a learning experience to snap out of those preconceived feelings I've had my whole life.
And secondly, and probably more importantly, I found this speech dictation tool made by a single guy in Sri Lanka. It's called SpeechPulse, and it has made my whole life so much better
I can't really find anyone else on the internet using it. This poor guy, bless his heart, has been writing this application and providing weekly, if not monthly, updates to it. It's been a couple of years now since he started on it, and honestly, it's just so good. It's based on the OpenAI Whisper voice language model, so the voice dictation is really accurate. The best part is: This application does not work via the API, but you can actually download the entire voice model. And it just loads into your RAM or VRAM, so it's only really suitable for people with high-end gaming PCs. As running this application uses approximately 4 gigabytes of RAM and 10 gigabytes of VRAM, but hey, that's not a problem for me, thank goodness. It has loads of features that many voice dictation applications don't have. You can tell it to replace certain words it picks up with others. You can create custom words that aren't in the English dictionary. You can program commands so that when you say something, it will be replaced with something entirely unique. And the best feature of all is that it lets you load in large language models as well, although small versions because I don't have 80 gigabytes of VRAM like you would get on something like an H100 GPU that they used to run large language models like ChatGPT. But what it means is that you can speak out a sentence, and the large language model will take what you've said and fix all the issues with it. So it will add capital letters to names and brands for example and it will add appropriate punctuation. You can create custom templates so that you can teach the LLM to edit what you're saying in various ways. Create templates for emails, for instance, to make your text more formal with a "Hi" at the start and "Regards" at the end, among other things.
So anyway that's my update. You can probably tell that this isn't written exactly as I would normally write, as I've been using the above software, which slightly rewrites everything I say using a large language model. So sometimes it comes across as a bit too formal, but it essentially allows me to speak page after page after page without making a single writing or grammatical error. The downside is it's not a 100% one-to-one representation of what I actually said, but that is 100x better than having to correct the usual voice dictation mistakes
Hope you're all doing well. Hopefully I can visit here more often now that I can write and respond to messages easier.