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the wrong pus-colored sauce
Friday, March 28 2025
I got up early, but not as early as I'd been getting up, and eventually began my workday at home. There is a ritual where people say they are signing on and signing off via email to the whole company when they begin and end their workday or go to lunch, so I participated in that, aggravating though it was.
But then I also had to, you know, do work. So I tried to get a system set up where I could work most comfortably. Ideally I would've just worked at my Woodchuck workstation, perhaps using Remote Desktop to connect to my contemptible Windows 11 work-issued laptop as needed. But this proved impossible; I couldn't add my Woodchuck user as an acceptable Remote Desktop user, and when I reached out to the IT guy in the company, he said that doing what I wanted to do was forbidden due to the risk of malware getting onto the network. So I ended up copying a bunch of C# code to Woodchuck and working with it there. Since mostly all I was doing was looking at it, this worked okay. But it's likely when I got to compile code, it will be easiest to do it on the work laptop. By then, I hope to have a KVM setup so I can easily switch a monitor, keyboard, and mouse back and forth between Woodchuck and the work laptopt. (I haven't had a need to use a KVM in many years, but the limitations imposed on me leave me little choice.) I may have to devise other tools to help with this, particularly ones to keep directories in sync across two systems (which is something none of the restrictions prevent).
I didn't really know how to proceed on a task I'd been assigned to use an Azure key vault to store secrets currently being stored in JSON files. So I ended up asking ChatGPT, which in seconds came back with whole C# files for me to hook up to existing classes and methods. Unlike, say, "vibe coding," where people who don't know anything about coding get chatbots to create applications for them, I actually know how C# works and can understand the code that ChatGPT produces. What I didn't know was the specifics of the syntax to connect to an Azure key vault. Without ChatGPT, I would've searched online or perhaps swallowed my pride and asked a question on StackOverflow. The result would've ideally been the same, and I would've then implement it as I will be implementing what ChatGPT gave me. But that code would've probably been less specific, contained more bugs, would've taken hours or days to arrive, and would've been delivered in an envelope of insults and put downs (anyone who has ever used StackOverflow knows what I mean). By contrast, ChatGPT spit out exactly what I wanted in a few seconds, and it did so cheerfully. Obviously, this code has to work or I won't create a pull request. But it's a lot more likely to work than code produced any other way. People who think using ChatGPT is somehow wrong don't really understand how software is produced or that, no matter what, it still has to work.
Meanwhile our neighbor A came over with her dog Henry from her temporary quarters in Stone Ridge (her house is still being remodeled) to walk in the forest with Gretchen, Charlotte, and Neville (though Neville didn't end up going despite his love of A).
This evening, Getchen and I met our friends Falafel Cathy and Roy at La Florentina for a meal of sformato with tahini sauce, that is, purple pie. When we ordered, initially Cathy wanted to maybe order theirs with gluten-free crust, because she's trying to figure out what is causing her allergies. But then it seemed like sformato with gluten-free crust was going to suck, so she ordered it to have the usual crust, though she ordered a side of sweet potato fries to use as the "pizza dough." Normally I would've ordered minestrone soup, but La Florentina no longer offers that. So instead I had a cup of lentil soup. It proved watery and smelled like the body odor of a Pakistani taxi driver, so I won't be ordering that again.
While we waited for the sformato, Cathy asked me about my new job, and I told her the whole story, including my intention to use ChatGPT heavily. Meanwhile Gretchen kept being distracted by her phone because she was on-shift working as an intake coordinator for the New York Abortion Access Fund (NYAAF).
When the sformato came out, I tasted it an immediately knew something was wrong. As a vegan, foods containing dairy products now a strong signal to my brain. There is a quality that Gretchen has described as "gamey" to dairy products, and it's no longer a quality either of us like (though I am willing to toleratre it in low doses in fooods whose label I wasn't able to read). I asked those at the table, "Are you sure that's tahini?" So Gretchen dabbed a little of the pus-colored fluid off the cabbage and tasted it. She agreed that this wasn't tahini, meaning it must've been the poricini sauce, which is a dairy cream sauce containing porcini mushrooms. We quickly alerted our waiter, who went to get his manager. The cook admitted to them that he'd made a mistake, assuming we wanted porcini sauce because "nobody" orders the sformato with the tahini sauce option. In about 15 minutes, two new sformatos, this time with tahini sauce, were produced. And they were pretty good. (Tahini sauce is so much better than the bland gross-tasting porcini sauce that it's odd that it's not more popular.)
On the drive home, Gretchen suddenly wanted to stop in at the Downs Street apartment occupied by our least-favorite tenant, the one who is bad at paying her rent and refuses to move out. But then we got intel from another tenant that she wasn't there (and hadn't been there for days), so we canceled the mission at the Thruway traffic circle.
For linking purposes this article's URL is:
http://asecular.com/blog.php?250328 feedback
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