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costing me time instead of saving me time
Saturday, January 3 2026
This morning while I was doing what is now the daily morning routine of sitting around with a laptop and a cup of coffee in the morning, I learned that the United States of America had invaded Venezuela overnight and kidnapped its president, Nicolas Maduro. Not only that, but the United States will now be running the country and that its oil would be developed. It's the kind of crazy predatory thing one expects from Donald Trump, despite his winning of the FIFA Peace Prize. Now the clock starts on that project turning into a massive quagmire.
Up in the laboratory, I needed a way to more flexibly produce test data to simulate the serial output of a SolArk inverter so that I can build a proper parser for its new format into one of my slave Arduinos. I already had an Arduino sketch to produce canned data compiled into the sketch itself, but I wanted something where changing that data would be easy. So I had ChatGPT help me write an ESP8266 sketch to pull such data off a server. I then had ChatGPT write a PHP script to dump data from a text file line by line. Not only that, I also had ChatGPT write me a PHP script to parse that data into various versions of a deterministic data packet of the sort that the Arduino slave produces when parsing so that I could compare the two and help me zero in on what my problems might be. I had the entire parsing system written already, but it wasn't working, and wading into the complexities of what ChatGPT had written for me was going to require a lot of debugging information. It may well prove to be the case that for complex systems like this, entrusting a large language model to do much more than extremely low-level grunt work would actually cost me time instead of saving me time.
This evening Gretchen and I drove to our friends Lynn and Gregg's house to have dinner together. Lynn was making some sort of Korean noodle dish consisting of various baked vegetables and tofu mixed in with rice noodles and some sort of brown savory sauce. But as we were arriving, they realized the first batch of noodles were way overcooked and they needed to make another batch. That happened while we all stood around eating crackers with hummus, baba ghanouj, and a very fine wedge of vegan cheese. The conversation was rather bougie, with us mostly discussing the many places we will be traveling. Lynn and Gregg will be going to the Canary Islands, Spain, and southern Italy, and Gretchen and I will be going to the Caribbean. There was a little concern about how the invasion of Venezuela might impact our ability to fly into a city in the southern Caribbean, but we all quickly decided it would probably not impact us at all.
That Korean noodle dish was surprising good and well targeted to the things I like. It had red peppers, shitake mushrooms, tofu, and noodles, all things that I like. Dinner conversation spent a long time focused on the bookstore where Gretchen works, including her fraught dynamic with one of the owners. We also discussed how revelations of Neil Gaiman's sexual predation affected the bookstore. Gaiman used to regularly perform book signings in the store and his books were featured there prominently. But after horrifying revelations surfaced about how he'd wantonly sexually degraded one of his nannies and other women, all the special fanfare about his books disappeared. In recent months, though, that fanfare has steadily started to creep back in. "That's how it's been for everyone who was #MeTooed!" I declared. I then reminded everyone that Donald Trump is currently president of the United States.
Later we played a couple games of RumiKub, which was the highlight of the evening. I find that the mental challenge of coming up with ways to play out all my tiles near the end of the game is surprisingly delightful.
On the way home, we stopped briefly at A's house to feed the cat one last time, as A was at the time driving back from the airport, having spent a week or so in Scotland with her boyfriend Jamie.
For linking purposes this article's URL is:
http://asecular.com/blog.php?260103 feedback
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