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soup weather in late May
Wednesday, May 21 2025
Today over Google Chat (or whatever it is called now), I was communicating with my old colleague Joe in Salem, Massachusetts (he was the de facto lead of my team back when I worked at Catalisgov.com, the company I was laid off from in July of 2023. (Joe was laid off as well about six months later.) Joe and I share a love of using large language models to get shit done, though he's carried it to extremes. While I use ChatGPT to create specific functions from specifications that I provide or to fix known bugs, Joe uses it to build whole web apps in a technique that is more akin to "vibe coding."' He also has fantasies of somehow making money from his creations, which seems optimistic to a jaded person like me. (I can't get more than five people playing on my well-developed version of Spelling Bee, even though it uses the same data as and has numerous advantages over the version of the game hosted at the New York Times.)
Today Joe told me that he had a python script that could control WiZ smart lightbulbs. Apparently they are controlled by UDP connections with zero authentication. If that's true, that's huge, because I'd assumed I was cursed to control them exclusively with a proprietary smartphone app. (I'd made the mistake of buying smartbulbs back before I was fully aware of the problem of proliferating smartphone apps.) I took Joe's python code and ran it through ChatGPT to produce ESP8266 Arduino code. (I would later test this at home and it wouldn't work, but few things do without a little tweaking, especially the products of artificial intelligence.)
On and off all day in the brick and mortar workplace, I found myself dealing with someone at a company in Los Angeles who didn't seem to grasp that without a password or some sort of token for an account he had set up for me, I would never be able to use that account. My colleagues in the office were very sympathetic to my plight in dealing with this guy, telling me how unpleasant he'd been to work with. At lunch, it came up that I was working with that guy, and, not unexpectedly, the king of the lunchroom court waded in with how he would deal with it. He then held an imaginary phone to his head and said, "Look, you Chinese fuck..." The others groaned at the obvious racism, which wasn't even correctly targeted (the unpleasant guy, the one who is not the king of the lunchroom court, has a clearly Vietnamese name).
It was raining lightly when I got back home to Hurley, but I nevertheless got the dogs to join me on a walk up the Farm Road. Early in the walk, they split off to do their own thing, so I cut the walk short by climbing up the escarpment to the west prematurely and circled back north. The dogs, though, didn't return until a good ten minutes after I'd returned.
By then I was making a big pot of vegetable soup containing potatoes, kale, mushrooms, tomatoes, and a can of cannellini beans. To thicken the broth somewhat, I added a small amount of refried beans and nutritional yeast. The unseasonably cold, clammy weather made soup seem like an ideal dinner. I followed it with a hot bath, which was also very much in keeping with the conditions.
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http://asecular.com/blog.php?250521 feedback
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