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ChatGPT finds hard-to-find programming errors
Tuesday, January 28 2025
Gretchen has friend in the poetry world who lives in Austin who has a new book out and he would be reading it today at the New York City Public Library (the one we visited not long ago). So this afternoon she drove to Poughkeepsie and caught the Metro North train down to Grand Central Station. That left me by myself unsupervised. Had Gretchen been spending the night, my drinking rules would've allowed me to drink booze tonight. But since she planned to be coming home, I couldn't unless I created some art. So I painted a painting of a chickadee. I was working on a four inch square masonite panel and it didn't take long.
Today's painting of a chickadee.
Click to enlarge.
I needed to pick up a big five gallon bucket of a special paint that I'd specially ordered from Lowes, so I convinced the dogs to join me in the Forester and we drove out to 9W in via Enterprise Drive. I needed to restock my laboratory liquor, so Miron's Liquor was my first destination, followed by Lowes. While in Lowes, I also bought a paintbrush, a Monster energy drink, and another quart of high gloss white paint, as the paint I'd left out overnight in front of Andrea's house hasn't been the same since it froze solid. While waiting in line in the customer service area, there was an older gentleman there with a wad of cash he intended to buy something with (or perhaps make a payment with). I noticed he was wearing a red "Make America Great Again" hat, the first one I'd ever seen outside of the media (or jokingly presented in a videochat). Despite the fact that this person clearly wanted America to become a fascist oligarchy, when the woman in front of me in line went back to her car to get something and it was perhaps my turn, I indicated that the old man with the MAGA hat was technically next in line. That's the sort of common courtesy I extend to my fellow humans no matter how monstrous they are, though I doubt Gretchen would've done the same.
Back at the house, I attempted to take the dogs for a walk. But they both aborted it early (which isn't unusual for Neville but something Charlotte hasn't done since she got used to going on walks with me). So I returned to what I'd been doing on and off for much of the day: painting the laboratory floor and debugging the remaining issues with the new FRAM code in my ESP8266 firmware. One huge milestone with the laboratory floor was my extraction of the last carpet fragment from the northeast corner. It had been the last section of unpainted flooring covered by a carpet fragment. To extract it, I had to prop up the northeast corner of the homemade desk that I spend most of my waking hours seated at and then gradually tug the carpet fragment westward, rolling it up just east of the back of Woodchuck, my main computer (which has lain on its side for years now, like computers used to do before they all took on the tower form factor). Working in such close proximity to it, I could smell the old cat piss in that carpet fragment, and it was great to get it the hell out of my laboratory. With it out of the way, I could scooch Woodchuck and the rats nest of wires connected to it away from the unpainted part of the floor and begin painting it, the beginning of the end of a process that began about 22 years ago. By the end of the day, less than a square foot of unpainted floor remained in that area. The only other unpainted sections of laboratory floor are beneath furniture, some of which hasn't been moved in all that time.
Meanwhile, in an effort to debug my ESP8266 FRAM functionality, I had ChatGPT write me a few functions to do things like dump out records in the FRAM in hexadecimal and swap one record in the FRAM for another. By doing this, I was hoping to figure out why the temperature and time values being stored in the records weren't being retrieved as the same numbers. The temperatures could be off by as many as two degrees and the time values could be off by more than 50%. This kind of corruption had been subtle enough for me to overlook initially, but it was clear that something very wrong was happening. Whatever was wrong didn't seem to be in the saving of the data, it seemed to be in the retrieval of any but the first record. And by swapping the first record with the second, I was able to see that good data placed in the second record was also subtly garbled in this way. There was nothing obviously wrong with the code, so eventually I just pasted all the code (most of which ChatGPT had come up with to begin with) into ChatGPT with a description of the symptoms, and it immediately came back with a response. That response found more wrong with my code than was actually the case, but in amongst its unhelpful suggestions were a couple that, once implemented, caused my data to save and retrieve perfectly. I also soon had precision problem with 32 bit integers (caused by them being briefly cast as 32-bit floats) fixed as well, meaning the FRAM code was almost ready for a push to GitHub. I'd taken a recreational 150 mg dose of pseudoephedrine late this morning, but I have to credit ChatGPT for actually fixing my broken code.
Early this evening, I heard Charlotte losing her mind in the way that she does when Crazy Dave's dog Brigitte comes running through our yard like a bull in a china shop. Charlotte burst in and out through the pet door with such violence that it was soon separated into several constitutent parts. This has happened to various degrees many times, and I've always managed to glue it back together (these days mostly with Gorilla Glue). As I was getting ready to do this, Charlotte went bursting out the door one more time, this time just as Brigitee appeared. I'd thought Charlotte was terrified of Brigitte, since she often loses control of her bladder and even her bowels when Brigitte appears. But this time she leapt upon Brigitte and attacked! It was apparently just a strafing, because Charlotte then dove back indoors, now with a tuft of Brigitte's chestnut brown fur in her mouth. It's never good to see your dog attack another dog, but something about Brigitte triggers Charlotte, and she never acts this way towards any other dog. Perhaps if Charlotte is going to do this whenever Brigitte appears, she will eventually learn to stay home. Or, and I don't really expect this, to act less like a psycho.
To help with fixing the pet door, I used two incredibly strong rare earth magnets as a clamp to hold the plastic "window" sheets to the aluminum frame while the glue dried. (The plastic sheets form something of a double-pane window with an inch-wide gap between them, and that gap is too far for most magnets to clamp across.) At some point I screwed up and the two magnets slammed into each other like material in a collapsing black hole. To get them separated, I had to work a knife blade in between them and then gradually slide in a wedg-shaped shim until they were far enough apart for me to pull them apart with the strength of my arms.
Gretchen returned home a little after midnight while I was painting another layer of white paint on the recently-uncarpeted part of the laboratory floor.
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