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a new way to wind down a call with my brother
Tuesday, January 20 2026
I spent the whole day continuing my quest to get an I2C bootloader working on one of my Arduino slaves. Despite how badly it was going, I continued to ask ChatGPT questions in hopes it would help. But we kept ending up in LLM doom-loops, seeming almost sadistic with how quickly it forgot things I'd just told it. At times I was furious at it, posting in all caps and rubbing its nose in the facts it was ignoring. As ever, though, ChatGPT remained cheerful through it all. By the end of the day, it was clear that I needed to figure out a way to break this problem up into smaller pieces, and to do that would require deeper understanding. I was becoming familiar with Arduino bootloaders and how exactly they coexist with sketches, but the C code from the Twiboot repository just gave me headaches when I tried to make sense of it. Though it's essentially the same language as the Arduino sketches I've written myself and can easily edit, they're full of arcane C conventions that don't come up in my own code, particularly atributes, which result in extremely underscore-heavy code.
Meanwhile Gretchen's birthweek continued, with her going to pilates in Glenford at noon and then being taken out to dinner by Carrie, the friend who was, for a number of years, a former friend. And Charlotte continued to snub me when I'd try to walk her in the snowy, brutally-cold outdoors.
My brother Don called me just before I started fixing myself a vegan BLT (one with Bubbies pickles instead of tomatoes). I was descibing this to Don as I worked, and it made him so hungry that he had to end the call and make dinner for himself (that is, heat a package of frozen food from the Dollar Tree in a microwave oven). It's not often I find a new way to painlessly wrap up a Don Mueller phone call.
For linking purposes this article's URL is:
http://asecular.com/blog.php?260120 feedback
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