markjgsmith

Feeling a bit flat this morning, wondering if it‘s AI related. It‘s weird, I completed the project yesterday, there are loads of cool directions I can take it today, but I‘m just not feeling like it. #

AI betrayal, mood and lousy versioning

Feeling a bit down this morning.

It‘s somewhat odd because I had plenty of sleep, didn't miss any meals, and completed the project I was trying to get done yesterday. It‘s not alcohol related since I don‘t drink alcohol, and I only had one coffee yesterday morning, it‘s unlikely to be coffee. I did have a couple of glasses of Coke, so I suppose it could be that though I doubt it. The only other thing it could be is the media I consumed, a Louis CK live comedy special and a Louis Theroux interview with Danny Dyer. I really doubt it had anything to do with those two. That‘s just normal relaxation media watching.

Anyway I thought it was worth noting my mood today, because maybe our interactions with LLMs affect our mood. One of the things that did happen yesterday was that the LLM nearly totally derailed the entire project, in a very devious way, and created quite a hill to climb to fix it. From a user experience point of view, it was really terrible. The way it unfolded, and I wrote about it yesterday, it really felt like some form of betrayal.

Thank heavens I didn‘t lose any data. I bet that‘s going to happen at some point though, because the versioninig in these tools is really lousy. You never really know where your latest version is, and you have to ask the AI for it, and then how do you even go back to previous versions, the AI keeps saying don‘t worry it‘s all in the conversation thread, but that feels very sketchy to me. I want to have something I can click on, without needing the AI to oblige.

I guess this is the point where I need to consider one of the AI focussed IDEs rather than these web tools. #

A spelling rabbit hole

I just discovered how to enable spellcheck in neovim. That last word just got a sguiggle under it. Oh my gosh, there are sguigles everywhere now. Ok it‘s squiggle. Few.

I was getting tired of having to spend ages and ages after publishing a post, reading and correcting. Figured there must be a way. But searching around, enabling spellcheck seemed rather tedious.

So I tried to find a configuration for vim that would make it automatic for markdown files, but then discovered, or to be more precise, re-discovered that I am using nvchad so I no longer even have a vimrc file. Oh noes!

After more searching, found that in nvchad you can enable a grammarly LSP, which is a language server, and neovim is an LSP client, i.e. it can connect to any language server, that‘s how it does syntax highlighting btw. Yeah I had to search and read about all that too. Everything is a voyage of discovery these days.

At some point I discovered that with nvchad you can just do a :set spell and spellcheck is turned on. I guess it‘s somehow preconfigured with US english? Anyway turning it off is :set nospell. I learnt some of the spellcheck commands, which are pretty gnarly imho. Now I‘m thinking that this isn‘t an nvchad thing, maybe using :set lasts across restarts? I dunno.

Since I got spellcheck working, I thought, wouldn‘t it be great to have grammarly, because sometimes my grammar isn‘t all that wonderful. And I was installing the lsp via npm and read in some configuration / Readme somewhere that the lsp sends everything you write to the grammarly servers. Duh! Of course it does. That doesn‘t sound good.

IMO, we should really have spellcheck and grammarly functionality baked into the OS.

Anyway just another tech configuration rabbit hole. With any luck, the spelling in my posts might improve a bit going forward. #

It‘s one thing after another today. It‘s rabbit hole day. Maybe that‘s why I was feeling down earlier. Maybe I subconsciously already knew it was another rabbit hole day. Just discovered the space bar on the laptop sometimes squeaks when I tap it. Fuck. Rabbit hole days suck. #

I hadn‘t noticed before but PM‘s Question Time seems like it‘s modelled after a marriage counciling session. Everything is Mr Speaker this and Mr Speaker that. Perhaps that‘s the only way of doing it. The other way of looking at it, is that it‘s two small siblings having an argument. Do any other nations have a PM question time type setup? It‘s quite a weird public dynamic to force your politicians into. And maybe a strange thing to make the nation watch. Then again perhaps it‘s a good thing. #

More AI developer tools weirdness. Yesterday and the day before Gemini had absolutely no problems whatsoever seeing / remembering our previous chats, and it also had no problems reading files online. In fact I had it do both of those things many times in our chats. Today it‘s telling me that it can‘t do either.

It‘s actually stranger though, because today I got it to read my blog, but it said the latest post was the one called "Vibe War Games", which was a post from several days ago. #

If you are a hardcore leftist you might at first find this a bit triggering, but I think it‘s worth pursuing until the logical conclusion. I asked Gemini: Why dont they call the public sector the government sector?, a very very interesting discussion ensued. #