Fred and Loathing on The Internet

I Have Yet To Hear A Joke a Chatbot Wrote That Made Me Laugh

2023-Jun-14

Every now and then while I’m on the clock and feel the specter of Imposter Syndrome haunting over my workflow, I like to check in at my own website. Seeing my QA tested website put out some new interesting information every day (or even few minutes) served over the whole world fucking wide web over the network of hosts using Internet Protoco calms my work demons. Today I found an easy vector for improvement on one of my musings. Or so I thought it would be! I mean it was easy, but with a tinge of aggravation that comes from using 6 or ‘06’ to define the current month.

That being said, it means when you go down to /dash/2023- or 2024 when the time comes- now will show the latest month of the year by default. That means no changes for previous years. Also I threw in a link to the current year-month’s version of that dashboard in the /stats page.

Also… Woah. I’ve been using chat GPT hard at work to get a second opinion on how to refactor my code to maximize Spark’s parallelization. Recently I did it with my recreational coding. Gawd it is so handy. It works great at quickly getting out of troubleshooting dead ends. I’ve also found it useful to get some small simple stuff in new libraries or frameworks started instead of finding an online tutorial and cutting out the relevant stuff from their github. My ultimate best method to learn new computer stuff is to find something working, then change one thing at a time until you zero in on what you want or discover some options. I like to think these chat bots do wonders to help you quickly fuck around and to quickly find out.

A backlogged subject I have wanted to learn -ever since I saw an exhibit at the Field Museum about the several species riddening cataclysms that had occurred, including the dinosaur killing one I was aware prior to the exhibit- were the order of geological eras. Thanks to a non-fiction book I read shortly after reading Jurassic Park in the mid-90s, I learned the eras of the dinosaur go from Triassic, Jurassic, and Cretaceous, with the coolest predators of the novel actually living in the era later than the title would indicate. The mammal book I’m reading, by Stephen L. Brusatte does a good job of contextualizing the evolutionary process along the continental drifting and polar shifts with each geological era’s transition.