{"id":55336,"date":"2023-03-21T00:01:12","date_gmt":"2023-03-21T04:01:12","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/?p=55336"},"modified":"2023-03-21T11:06:27","modified_gmt":"2023-03-21T15:06:27","slug":"hah-fixed-an-oddly-placed-argument-for-ai","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/?p=55336","title":{"rendered":"Hah! Fixed!"},"content":{"rendered":"

Alright, so I have a confession to make; I have been doing the big<\/em> procrastinations on this website. I could argue that it’s the grief, which is partly true, and a pretty easy ‘get out of jail free’ card. But, if I’m honest with myself, it’s not enough of the truth to just write it off. Like, yes, working on the site makes me miss my dad, and more than that makes me want to shake both him and the universe by the shoulders, because working on a dead man’s code is a fool’s errand Why does it work like that?! Why?! Tell me, god damn it!<\/span>.<\/span><\/p>\n

But, really, even if he were alive today, he likely wouldn’t be able to tell me. I can imagine the conversation very vividly as it’s one I’ve had with him before.<\/p>\n

I’d bring him the issue, explaining that the image I’m uploading isn’t working, or the color I’m inputting isn’t being picked up by the server despite the fact that according to the inspect element, it’s exactly where it should be. He says I’ve done it wrong, since it clearly says that’s where it’s pulled from, and then, he goes down the exact same rabbit hole I just did, and confirms exactly what I just told him.
\n<\/p>\n

Eventually he finds that it’s because he told the server or image host to reroute through an identical piece of code in a different place, making the one we’ve been editing redundant. He scratches his head, laughs at himself, and tells me to put it in the reroute location because obviously he did it for a reason.\u00a0 We never find out why, and three years later when it’s time to edit it again we have to figure it out all over.<\/p>\n

I’d fault him for not believing me the first time, but honestly I’ve never met a coder that did otherwise.<\/p>\n

So, yes, grief makes me not want to stumble through the coding wilderness without him, but it’s plain and simple ‘don’t wanna’ that made me take this long to finally do it.<\/p>\n

Now, I should acknowledge that obviously when I say I ‘fixed it’ I obviously don’t mean I’ve finally moved the site over to a new location with updated plugins and security. If that were true this post would be in, or contain a link to, a new location, which it isn’t, and doesn’t. My job is to work here, with what I have. I don’t have access to the server hosting and Patreon stuff, that’s all Mom. No, my job is to write posts, do bodge style coding, and do basic management and delegation.\u00a0 When I say I ‘fixed it’ I mean I finally got rid of the transparency issues and figured out how to set colors for different users. But, more than that, I mean I finally dug into the tangled wires of the code enough to figure out how all this works and how to fix little fires.<\/p>\n

What made me finally buckle down? A Tom Scott video<\/a>, and ChatGPT, obviously.<\/p>\n

See, I’m not a coder, but I come from coding. Both Mom and Dad programmed when I was growing up. Mom did website design, Dad did game development, two really useful and very different things that I always felt like I ‘should’ pick up. But, coding changed so rapidly that by the time I managed to learn enough of anything to make anything at all, it was entirely obsolete. Dad taught me how to program a version of Snake just like he had when he was my age, and Mom taught me how to move buttons around my WordPress site, but neither skill remained useful for longer than a few months. And, meaning to or not, having parents that can just swoop in and ‘here let me do it’ when you’re slow on the uptake doesn’t really facilitate a learning environment.<\/p>\n

So, the Tom Scott video. To summarize, (although it’s a great watch if you’ve got the time), he explains that he used ChatGPT, an AI chat program, to create some code to automate a program to label files for his email. He mentioned that he was out of the coding loop, and mostly got existential about a possible technological boom. I saw this and thought, hey, maybe I can use ChatGPT to automate updating the website.<\/p>\n

Of course it wasn’t that simple, and I didn’t really expect it to be, but something I didn’t expect was for it to be a great teaching<\/em> tool. AI doesn’t get irritated if you don’t get it on the first try. I was able to put in every line of code from the back-end of this website, and it told me line by line what it did, why it was likely there, and if I asked, how to edit it. This would have, of course, been possible with a human being, but it would have taken hours, and I would have been filtering what code to send through a filter of ‘hey, does this bit actually seem important or relevant?’. Sending it through a piece of tech meant I could take my time, wallow for a minute if I needed to, and waste its time <\/em>with all the emotional garbage of just wanting to understand four hundred lines of metadata back-end code, because I can’t ask my dad anymore.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Alright, so I have a confession to make; I have been doing the big procrastinations on this website. I could argue that it’s the grief, which is partly true, and a pretty easy ‘get out of jail free’ card. But, if I’m honest with myself, it’s not enough of the truth to just write it […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":9,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[618],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-55336","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-epilogue"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/55336","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/9"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=55336"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/55336\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":55346,"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/55336\/revisions\/55346"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=55336"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=55336"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.shamusyoung.com\/twentysidedtale\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=55336"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}