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single pair of tracks in the snow
Friday, April 11 2025
setting: rural Hurley Township, Ulster County, New York
For some reason I continued my attempts to add unit tests to that Angular project, still using ChatGPT as my personal assistant. Part of what I was doing was seeing whether or not ChatGPT is effective at such things, since, if it isn't, then clearly our concerns about the human-displacing potential of large language models is overblown. I also wanted to dig a little deeper into the problems I was having, which were a consequence of a dependency injection somewhere else in the code base. I figured looking for and correcting that would help me better acquaint myself with the Angular code I will be working with. Eventually, once I abandoned ChatGPT's suggestions for a time and did some searches to establish dependency chain (something it never suggested that I do), I was able to find the injection. I wasn't actually able to fix the problem, mind you, but at least I found its source. I then shelved the tests on that thing (it was a resolver) and tried to instead create some tests for a component. When those tests ended up producing the same issues as the tests for the resolvers, that was it, I was done for the day. The upshot of all this: if you have a truly complicated problem on your hands, it might be best to use your reasoning skills and avoid getting stuck in a ChatGPT loop.
The weather would be cold and wet this weekend, but there were some issues I wanted to address with the microcontrollers up at the cabin, so after work I packed up the Forester (since I didn't know how snowy it would be) with all the things I needed, though I left Gretchen and the dogs at home. It was going to be 40 degrees Fahrenheit in the cabin, and I didn't want the dogs waiting around in that cold for temperatures to rise to a comfortable level.
On the drive north, I stopped at the Cairo Hannaford for the usual supplies (including sour dough bread, tofu, tempeh, various fun pasta shapes, and a 12 pack of Atomic Torpedo beer).
There was an inch of snow on Woodworth Lake Road when I turned onto it, and beyond a specific house on the left, there was only a single pair of tire tracks in that snow. At that point I was very glad I hadn't driven the Chevy Bolt.
Once I had the fire going and had switched on the boiler and the two minisplit air handlers, I could go to work fixing the various microcontroller issues. I needeed new INA219s on the East Basement Controller and the SolArk Copilot, and I needed to reflash the firmware on the ESP8266 that monitors outdoor temperatures (it had apparently never worked since I'd flashed it last weekend, mostly because it was horribly misconfigured).
Then I took a 150 mg dose of diphenhydramine and curled up with a laptop on the couch, mostly watching YouTube videos about murderers, particularly Nancy Brophy, the unsuccessful (and insufferable) romance novelist who spent most of her household budget on life insurance policies for her husband before killing him in a manner foreshadowed in one of her "novels," using a gun whose barrel was easily disposed of.
For linking purposes this article's URL is:
http://asecular.com/blog.php?250411 feedback
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