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inscrutable and contain a high density of information
Thursday, December 28 2023
I took a recreational 150 mg dose of pseudoephedrine this morning in hopes of making further improvements on the text analysis system that I am writing as a spec project for my old boss Alex. The first issue I tackled was a module that uses ChatGPT to read a page of text and list all the proper nouns it finds. I'd already written the part that sends the text and a prompt to the API. Now what I needed to do was parse the response, which came back as unstructured text. (I asked ChatGPT itself if its API could send back structured data in response to a prompt, and it said that it could not.) I wrote a perfectly good parser for a sample API response, but then in subsequent tests I learned that the responses were non-deterministic. The same query could return data in different styles of English sentences, meaning the delimiters I was looking for could not be counted on. Perhaps this is fixable with a better prompt, one that specifies a data format that can be embedded in one of those specially-formatted blocks used for presenting code.
The other issue I wanted to tackle was to write a better processor for automating the finding of proper nouns not using artificial intelligence. Based on what Alex told me it should do, I thought I would have to write a multi-stage function to do what needed to be done. Before doing that, though, I thought I'd give Alex's instructions that he'd given me directly to ChatGPT and have it write the function. What it came back with was a simple function based on a very elaborate regular expression that was as follows:
/\b(?:The\b)?(?:[A-Z][a-z]*\b(?:\s+(?:(?:(?!The\b)[A-Z][a-z]*\b)|(?=\.\s)))+\b)+/
I could just drop into my existing test editor (no custom function needed!) and use it immediately. As you can see, regular expressions are inscrutable and contain a high density of information, rendering them brittle and difficult to either construct or edit. But ChatGPT is great at turning English instructions into regular expressions, sometimes ones of great complexity.
Since I was on pseudoephedrine, I knew I would want to be drinking alcohol at some point. So throughout the day I painted an iridescent green beetle to replace another small painting of a beetle that I recently included in a package for Gretchen's father in celebration of his 79th birthday (on Boxing Day).
Early this afternoon I wanted to go to Home Depot to pick up a 36 foot ladder I'd ordered. When I told Gretchen, she came up with a bunch of other errands for me to run, all of which I agreed to. One of these was to have Neville's nails trimmed at PetSmart, so I brought him (but not Charlotte) with me.
In Hurley, I dropped items off at the post office and picked up books at the library. Then I went out to 9W to have Neville's nails done. I'd been told I could just drop in any time before 2:30pm, but when I arrived a little before 1:00pm, everybody must've been off at lunch, and there were huge piles of dog hair around the grooming stations. Eventually, though, Neville's favorite nail technician arrived. Neville has had an infected nail on one of his hands, and she said she couldn't clip any of the nails on that whole limb, but for some reason I left her a whole five dollar tip.
Next I went across 9W to Staples, which now has a service for online retailers where you can dump off your unpackaged returns and they handle them for you (in this case it was a sweater and something else). People are finding ways to provide small conveniences that would've never occurred to me.
I bought some groceries (with an emphasis on beans, bananas, and beer) at the 9W Hannaford, the last non-ladder errand of the outing, and then went to Home Depot. When the guy came out with the ladder loaded on a cart, he said something about my car (the Forester) being a bit small to transport such a large object. Evidently he didn't know anything about what a roof rack can do. His colleague felt the need to add that they, Home Depot, bore no responsibility for anything that happened to the ladder on the ride home. My old Subaru outbacks all had handy hooks near the front and back bumpers where you could lash a rope, but whoever designed the 2015 Forester decided to make it less useful by eliminating all that. I ended up having to lash the back stabilization rope to a part of the suspension and the front stabilization rope through a mystery hole that seemed to go through a part of the metal frame. At 18 feet in length, this collapsed ladder was likely the longest object I've ever put on a roof rack, though I have moved many 16 foot pieces of lumber this way. While I was loading the Forester, Neville was snorting around near some people loading sheets of drywall on the roof rack of a marroon-colored Subaru Outback similar to the two cars that preceded our Forester in its vehicular role. Their roof rack didn't have the cross-members, so they'd improvised something with two by fours. I said I used to have a car like theirs and hauled drywall on it like they were doing. Now, I pointed out, I'm carrying long ladders with my roof rack.
Back at the house, Charlotte was delighted to see Neville after his absence of a couple hours.
Later this evening, Diane the Cat was doing more of that weird behavior she does to avoid Charlotte. She kept wanting to go outside. I went looking for her a couple times down in the greenhouse, but she wasn't there. It turned out she was lying on a cushion of a pushed-in chair at the dining table. When she disappeared from that, I found her down near the greenhouse. I carried her in, and eventually she decided to hang out with me in the laboratory. By this point I'd started drinking and was into the second season of For All Mankind. I was starting to be annoyed by the physics of the scenes supposedly set on the moon. People were walking around inside the moon base clearly under the forces of Earth gravity. Why couldn't they do some sort of effect, like slow down the establishing shots so that people seem to be walking inside the base under the weaker force of lunar gravity?
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