Your leaking thatched hut during the restoration of a pre-Enlightenment state.

 

Hello, my name is Judas Gutenberg and this is my blaag (pronounced as you would the vomit noise "hyroop-bleuach").



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   using the ChatGPT API
Tuesday, December 26 2023
I was feeling good last night by myself in the laboratory with the ingested cannabis and the little booze drinks I kept fixing myself. At some point, though, I started thinking about my left shoulder joint and what could be wrong with it. I'd fallen down the stairs in late July and then recovered fairly quickly. But then I'd slipped on the font steps of the cabin and caught myself with my left arm, which seemed to traumatize the arm again. And then Gretchen somehow injured it by lightly snuggling with me on that side while on the boat on the Douro River in Portugal. Since then, I've been careful not to traumatize it further, but it no longer seems to be healing either. The cannabis had me thinking that perhaps all the tendons and ligaments are now frayed so badly that a mild force could tear through them completely. That's not a good cannabis thought to have, and dulling such thoughts contributed to my drinking.
So this morning when I woke up, I fully expected to have a five alarm hangover. But the hangover was mild, mostly just taking a few points off my IQ this morning on what was to be yet another day of a very long weekend in the living room. I'd run out of coffee, so I was driniking tea. But otherwise it might well have been a Saturday. Gretchen and I collaboratively played Spelling Bee and I grazed on lots of leftovers, including half my TLT from the Garden Café Sunday afternoon and those pastries from the Little Loaf Bakery. There was also still chili from last Wednesday and some braised kale. Gretchen had busted into a bag of injera, and chili and braised kale make for pretty good wats (Ethiopian stews) when that's all you have. Later when we were out of chili, I opened a can refried beans, knowing that goes great with injera right out of the can.

Back on Friday evening when we'd had people over to help us eat baked goods, Jeff had mentioned a show he'd been watching called For All Mankind, which he'd described as an alternative history that imagined the space race against the Russians going on for longer than it did, resulting in a different course of events. I'd found this intriguing, so I subsequently downloaded nearly four whole seasons of it. Today I started watching it. I found it a bit slow to get to the good parts. It starts with a successful Russian manned lunar landing, stealing most of Neil Armstrong's thunder. From there, the United States has to best the Russians somehow, but they keep failing to do so. The Russians follow the first man on the moon with the first woman on the moon. So then Nixon has America race to put the first permanent base on the moon, and that is where the history it depicts really begins to diverge with the timeline we're in. At some point we hear a radio broadcast about how Ted Kennedy has had to cancel a planned vacation in Chappaquiddick so he could spend time holding hearings to investigate Russia's beating America to the moon, and you realize that now he won't have the skeleton of Mary Jo Kopechne in his closet when it comes time to run for president.

Later this evening, I registered at OpenAI so I could use the ChatGPT API to communicate with the spec project I've been building for my old boss Alex. I wanted to do some experiments using a large language model to tell me about the content of text that, up until now, I'd been parsing with regular expressions and other relatively primitive text scanning technologies. Generally I never pay for any software service if it is available in any form for free. So I use the older, free version of ChatGPT when (as I often now do) I need to converse with an artificial intelligence. But there is no free version of the ChatGPT API, so I put $10 on my account and ran an experiment that ultimately only cost me a single cent. But it gave me the data I needed. I saved the JSON object it returned so that I could figure out how to parse it offline. And I also took note of how long it had taken to comprehend a single page of English text (a few seconds). This suggested that a ChatGPT module might be the best way to solve certain difficult English parsing challenges.


Charlotte under the blankets on the living room couch today. Click to enlarge.


Neville under the blankets on the living room couch today. Click to enlarge.


Both dogs in one picture. Click to enlarge.


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http://asecular.com/blog.php?231226

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