(morning writing, work, fascism, rant, 5.home)

[elainegrey]

Moving personal notes above the ranting:

Accidentally got all my hair dyed pink (magenta) on Wednesday when i imprecisely asked for the usual pink highlights. Anyhow, it will be fun. And it is a good color for me, so i'm pretty confident i can carry this off. My worry is maintenance, but I can always buy some temporary dye for my roots if it grows out badly.

Replaced our range this week after the one stove eye we mainly used on the previous range died at what the internet tells me is about the lifetime. Hoping that this one, which replaces the previous "fast boil" (aka "fast burn") eye with with a grill accessory will use the elements more evenly. Also, the split oven now has a split door which seems likely to be an improvement. Need to acquire a third oven rack, though.

Also have a new weed wacker that hopefully will be better about adding new line. I was willing to switch battery systems for this promised improvement.

Must mow weeds today. The invasive false hawkweeds are about to go to seed. Then back to digging. Worked late the last two days.

--== ∞ ==--

The Artemis II mission has been a delight to monitor. I will admit joking as we watched the work to extract the astronauts that they were all catching up on the news and refusing to leave the capsule and demanding to return to space. Or that the three Americans all were applying to become Canadian citizens.  When Christine muttered that there had to be a better way, i noted that if we still had a shuttle -- or the commercial projects were reliable -- the crew could have docked at the space station and been returned to earth with a landing in Florida and a dignified exit. While the shuttle did have a few "rapid unscheduled disassembly" events, that was two out of 135 missions, over thirty years. Why we couldn't build on successful work....

I note that there's less reported delight here than pointing at my great dissatisfaction and bitterness.

--== ∞ ==--

Work continues with intensity, but different focus.  Work wants us leaning into AI (sigh) so i have been using AI to review existing code and document the constraints and controls that have evolved since 2007.  I've learned things that are concerning already, so i will continue. It's been frustrating, as my standard for documentation is different than the agent's, probably because my purpose is less usual.  "Concise and precise," i keep lecturing as i encounter rambling comments and descriptions that are redundant with the documentation. I keep thinking that i'm almost at a point i might be able to stop obsessing, and then it spits out content that drives me nuts. I finally built enough of a body of documentation that i thought it could stand as an exemplar. Unfortunately the agent then added all its new work to the exemplar. When i sputtered about it failing its review against the exemplar, the response was, "But it says exactly this!" It inferred it was to keep the two in sync.  That was late last night.

I have also learned some things about "prompting": It thinks an appropriate response to a process question is to begin working. (I am at the edge of f bombs.) I also need to tell it explicitly that it is to assume i want it to do the whole prompt and not stop in the middle to check if i really meant it. (Oh, the cursing.) Not that i believe any of these instructions are going to be persistently effective, as i have evidence it will ignore instructions. The guidance document begins with "Agents do not edit this file," and the agent keeps editing it. When i last asked, "What does the file say about editing it?" the agent edited it to say it could edit it under some rambly conditions i didn't care about because NO.  Maybe with the instruction that questions do not mean to go work, Socratic questions won't trigger revisionist behavior.  (Is this hope? Lying to myself? What?)

Also i didn't add the production code to the change management for the documentation work because (1) it's not changing and (2) it's managed elsewhere.  I lost track of the number of times the agent quit work (or made up stuff) because it thought it didn't have the code. I think it's finally documented where it is enough, but it still stopped and raised the concern that the code might be moved away.  (More cursing.)

Given that this is the database design and the code for the application that calls the database, it is the hard foundation work. There's lots of code debt where the database design and the data model no longer really match.  But then there are three additional applications that call the database and, for Reasons due to various nonsense in the early years, all manage and validate the data differently, and variously represent data in currently preferred manners that get translated before being pushed to the database. Two more applications also push data into the database through even more specialized flows, also with lots of hidden business logic. I hope i can get the scaffolding complete so those applications can be reviewed and documented in an truly automated manner.

The motive for this work is that another team wanted to be able to create and edit the records without going through all the guardrails of the existing clients... in May. So there is some urgency that we know what the cursed guardrails are ASAP.

In some ways, this is making way for my retirement. I am getting stuff documented in detail so i am not the validation engine before changes.

Entertainingly, on Tuesday i announced to colleagues that this introvert finds talking to AIs all day just as exhausting as being in a meeting all day with people. On Friday, a colleague from that meeting commiserated with my AI complaints by noting they had read this week that introverts find working with AIs just as exhausting as with people. I just bit my lip and nodded enthusiastically.

--== ∞ ==--

The whole genocidal fascist in charge thing is also an escalation of distress that i wasn't good at verbalizing to begin with. Perhaps noticing the number of fascists who think it's wrong is encouraging? Is it no longer an Overton window but a Overton retractable roof over a mega-coliseum? I glanced at images of damage to the Golestan Palace. It has been clear to me that the racisim that underlines the attributions of Western Culture is a type of intentional ignorance. I know enough to know so much of what is considered Western Culture is indebted to Persian culture to be horrified. Ah, a quick search indicates that Iran celebrated the 2,500th anniversary of the founding of the Persian Empire in 1973. I just... https://www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctt1w6tbv4  Ooh look, America is 250 years old.