Fighting with computers

 After my initial excitement with chatGPT, I have been trying to use it in the real world. I needed to plan a certain programming task and I was expecting to get it done quickly and easily with the help of AI, but the result has been quite different.  The first big problem is that code tends to get cut with no warning sign. You get a snippet of code where part of it is missing. Sometimes it is more evident than others and when you mention that in the chat, the machine goes back to produce another snippet that many times is cut again. Not so smart or efficient. The only workaround I have found digging in the OpenAI discourse forum is to report the last line of the output so the machine can continue with (hopefully) the rest of the code. That approach seems to work better as I guess the culprit is the limitation of the maximum length of the output code. But the next problem is the code generated did not work. Sometimes the reason was quite evident like they are trying to use a data type

 Against my better judgment, I am moving away from Android and into Apple claws. The fact that Samsung has consistently priced its Galaxy line above almost anyone else is not helping. Not an Apple hater here so I thought I could give the iPhone 13 a try.  I was not eager to make such a switch as I dreaded moving all the apps to another system and keeping my data in the process. My wife did a while ago and lost all the WhatsApp messages in the process no matter how hard we tried. Meta is mostly the one to blame in my opinion.  So how was the move?  In a nutshell, not good.  I installed the Android app made by Apple to ease the transition. I selected I wanted to move all my data and apps together with WhatsApp messages. The Android and iPhone told me it would take 41 minutes, later just 22 minutes, which lasted several hours. Oddly, the Android transfer seemed to keep working at a slow pace while it looked stuck to 22 minutes on the iPhone side. Frustrated I went to bed.  The next mornin

I am following the Advent of Code 2022 programming event. I was about to say contest, but I wonder if that would be the correct name. Anyway, AoC presents different programming challenges to the users to be solved daily from December 1st to 25th.  The humorous problem statements and quite doable problems make it a fun programming experience that does not use much of your time. But what shocked me this year was that GPT-3 was being used to solve problems at lightning speed .  Once I opened an OpenAI account, I could try how good this thing is at solving programming exercises. I see the system is powerful enough to solve many programming quizzes I wrote for my students. It even handles them if written in Spanish.  And it is not only that you get some code as a result, but you can keep asking for refinements in case the first version does not have all the required features. Of course, to provide such a level of guidance, you need to be knowledgeable about programming, but now I will be p