I just ran across a thread in which a person asserts that GitHub Copilot is a bad tool precisely because it makes it easy to write lots of repetitive code. Their argument amounts to the claim that repetitive, boilerplate code is bad, and if you find yourself writing enough of it that Copilot seems likeContinue reading “Let’s Not Argue About Tools”
Author Archives: pirateguillermo
Oh, You Meant Angst!
Two days ago the U.S president took a plane trip from the relative security of Washington, D.C. to somewhere in Israel (Tel Aviv?), which is an active war zone. He did this in order to…I have no idea. Be seen and talked about, I guess. This morning, I saw a headline about the governor ofContinue reading “Oh, You Meant Angst!”
Code Editor Nova
I hate having to come up with titles for things. I’m bad at it. With blog posts it’s even worse, since the thing I am thinking about when I start writing is often not even the thing that the post turns out to be about, and I suck at titles anyway, and then looking back,Continue reading “Code Editor Nova”
Doing DB Stuff in Vapor
Having imported a bunch of tables from an Access database into a Postgres database, I want to transform them so that the information can be used by a Vapor application. Mostly, that app is just going to do exporting again, but you never know; someday someone might actually want to do something more intricate.
Be Careful What You Wish For
So, a lawyer decided to use ChatGPT to “help” write some papers he filed in court, but got in trouble when the included citations were bogus. The naive interpretation of this is that the computer program is broken, and it’s a danger to society and ought to be really regulated, and actually, I don’t disagree.Continue reading “Be Careful What You Wish For”
The Mysterious Fix
And now that we’re home and I’ve got a decently fast and wide connection (compared to the ship)…I’ve spent a bunch of time rebuilding and testing my various layers of Docker images. And guess what? Ubuntu “jammy” with OpenSSL 3 compiles my stuff just fine. *sigh*. Again, the lesson here is that people who writeContinue reading “The Mysterious Fix”
Khaaaaaaaaan!
Okay, so I caught COVID a week ago, so I’m confined to quarters until I stop testing positive. This is fine. Except that the stateroom is a pretty effective Faraday cage and I can’t get online much. Tired of watching BBC adverts for BBC shows, and tired of playing video games, I started poking deeperContinue reading “Khaaaaaaaaan!”
Pigs in Space
The other day I saw a lecture on space travel technology. The speaker was talking about how fast various kinds of propulsion systems (existing and potentially possible within the next 30-50 years) could get a vessel going, and how long that vessel would take to get to the nearby stars. That got me thinking aboutContinue reading “Pigs in Space”
Small Chunks
We’re on our way home, and there are mostly sea days from now on. So, I thought I’d go ahead and do a bit of work on my server code. First up, I can’t compile my servers any more because BlueSSL (which is required by the SMTP package, which my servers use to send transactionalContinue reading “Small Chunks”
Hell Is Certain Other People
So, there’s this basic tactic of the pitch man: promise to tell the customer something interesting, but then go off and talk about other stuff. Periodically, the other stuff gets interrupted with a reminder that if the customer keeps listening, they’re about to get the really great thing, but first, there’s this other stuff toContinue reading “Hell Is Certain Other People”