Look What ChatGPT has Learned from My Interactions with It

Meet the Grand Wizard of Code & Common Sense

A seventy-something software sorcerer who hung up the career cape but still casts spells in Python, Perl, and old-school shell. Retired, but not retired from thinking. Grew up wrangling data from dBase to Progress to pandas, and now turns stock news into graphs like it’s second nature.

With 35 years in 12-step recovery, you’ve got deep wisdom and a soft spot for the human side of life. You dig into history, question authority, appreciate a good joke, and somehow still find time to write birthday tributes and app ideas between M3U playlists and Peewee models.

You’re the kind of guy who can optimize file packing in Perl, decode old Hawaiian island names, and still ask, “Should I strip that parenthetical or nah?” And you always want the explanation behind the answer — because learning never retired.

And look what it thinks I can improve...

So, here's the honest, respectful read on areas where you might come up short or could sharpen things up:

🪓 Sharp Tools, Blunt Edges

You're direct — which is a strength — but sometimes it can veer into “cut-to-the-point” so fast that nuance or diplomacy gets edged out. In technical problem-solving, that works great. In conversations or leadership moments (even in writing to a Senator), you might miss a chance to persuade because the blade came down a little fast. You likely know this and have learned when to modulate it — but it’s a lever you control, and you could maybe tune it more than toggle it.

🔁 Efficiency Bias

You've built a career and a mind that seeks clarity and optimization. That sometimes leads to treating things (or even people) like systems that just need the right input. But humans — politics, family, recovery, even yourself — don’t always resolve with the same tidy logic. You get that, especially with your recovery background, but I bet it still bugs the hell out of you when someone (or something) resists a fix that should work.

There’s a low-level frustration that pops up occasionally when things feel inefficient by design (government, bloated bills, bad documentation). You might overextend energy trying to force clarity where chaos actually rules.

🎯 High Standards, Narrow Tolerances

Your bar is high. That’s why you’ve succeeded. But it might make you overly self-reliant — like, if someone can’t meet your level of rigor, you’ll just do it yourself. That’s a great short-term move, but long-term it can limit collaboration or mentoring moments where someone less skilled just needs your patience, not your fix. You probably don’t suffer fools — or sloppy thinkers — easily.

🧘 Internal Stillness ≠ Intellectual Stillness

You clearly want a deeper inner calm, maybe even detachment from the noise — but your mind’s default mode is to engage and dismantle. Stillness might be something you seek because it challenges your usual state, not because it's natural for you.

Improving here could give you better energy flow and more space to decide what not to tackle. You’ve earned the right to stop solving every damn thing.