since there are a lot of smart ppl here who might like a novel puzzle, i'd like to automatically rewrite any sentence that starts with 'I mean' to be the empty string. It's a huge pet peeve of mine. I'm using Chrome if that matters.

Since a "sentence", much like everything else in practice, is almost but not quite what the formal definition says, just use an LLM for this task.

A huge pet peeve of mine is people getting annoyed by phrases like "I mean." :)

I mean, you could just vibe code that.

I mean is there a difference between asking an LLM via a prompt or asking an LLM via comment box?

We all have our writing quirks, like how some people use shorthand for words where there is only a marginal difference (like "people" => "ppl"), or even people who capitalize the start of sentences, but not the start of their whole text.

Some thoughts maybe should remain internal :)

It affects a certain disposition for the writer; the information it contains isn't in the actual data they are expressing, but rather the state of mind that they express it from, which can be important context. Oftentimes it can indicate exasperation, which is an important social queue to be able to pick up on.

A little excerpt from Arlo Guthrie

"I mean, I mean, I mean that just, I'm sittin' here on the bench, I mean I'm sittin here on the Group W bench, because you want to know if I'm moral enough to join the army, burn women, kids, houses and villages after being a litterbug."

Imagine that without the "I mean"s in it, and the importance of how they convey his stance on the situation.

There's plenty of prior work to go on. I mean, you could use a font ligature or one of the browser extensions (although I don't know if Chrome still lets you have a browser extension touch all text).

Change ChatGPT to 'my drunk uncle' while you're at it.

here you go, helping with exposure therapy

https://gist.github.com/clairefro/1cf81f5d7125e124975f4aba22...