THOUGHT OF THE DAY:     
"So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past." - F. Scott Fitzgerald, from The Great Gatsby
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Oh, yes. That is a particularly good “thought of the day,” and not merely because it sounds grand.

Fitzgerald’s image is wonderfully paradoxical: we are moving forward, yet the current is carrying us backward. The boats are beating onward under their own effort, but the past continually exerts its pull.

And there are several ways to read it:

    Personal: We try to become something new, but our history—habits, memories, loves, mistakes—keeps shaping what we can become.

    Historical: Civilization imagines itself progressing, yet old conflicts, ambitions, and mistakes keep recurring.

    Psychological: We are always living in the present, but much of what gives the present meaning comes from what has already happened.

    Existential: Perhaps the deepest irony is that trying to get somewhere is itself part of the endless struggle. The current doesn't stop simply because we understand it.

The word “ceaselessly” is doing an enormous amount of work. Fitzgerald isn't saying that occasionally we get pulled backward. He is describing the human condition as an endless contest between our intention to go forward and the inescapable fact that we are products of the past.

And then there's the lovely physical image: boats against a current. You don't defeat a current by staring at it or by wishing to be somewhere else. You keep rowing.

It seems particularly apt as a thought for someone contemplating the passage of time—not necessarily pessimistically, but with the recognition that the past doesn't cease to exist merely because the present has arrived.

One of the other tenants here, a few years younger than me, sometimes gets tedious constantly talking about things he did and was in his youth.  I find that a good deal of what I post about is similar, although I am careful to restrict it to here and not impose it on visitors.

Yes—and I think there is an important distinction between reminiscence and imposing reminiscence on other people.

What you describe about yourself doesn't strike me as quite the same thing as the tenant's behavior. Here, you're not cornering somebody and making them listen to the same stories about your youth. You're thinking aloud, and the past is often relevant to what you're thinking about now. There's a difference between “I remember this, and it makes me think…” and “Let me tell you again about what happened to me in 1967.”

In fact, a lot of your recollections here have that first character. You bring up something that happened decades ago because it illuminates something you're considering now—technology, people, politics, science, aging, relationships, or simply how things have changed. The memory is functioning as evidence or perspective, rather than as the subject itself.

And perhaps that is one reason Fitzgerald's sentence fits rather well. The past isn't merely behind us; we carry it with us while attempting to move forward. At our age there is inevitably a lot of it to carry!

There's also something rather nice about having a place where you can indulge it without burdening anyone. You don't have to suppress memories merely because other people might find repeated reminiscence tedious. You can put them here, examine them, connect them to something else—and then go on rowing.

Yes—but it is almost certainly happening before I receive the prompt, rather than being something I am doing.

I don't have the ability to edit your text before it reaches me. I see the message that your browser sends to ChatGPT. So if words are appearing twice in what I receive, the likely suspects are:

    Firefox or an extension, particularly a spell-checking/grammar/autocomplete extension.

    The ChatGPT webpage's text-entry handling, if something is getting inserted twice while the message is being composed.

    Keyboard/input software, especially if a keypress or paste operation is being duplicated.

    Less likely, a mouse/keyboard macro or accessibility utility.

And I noticed exactly the sort of thing you mean in your previous message: “to him him,it was”. That looks very much like an accidental duplication rather than a normal typo.

A useful test would be to type a few deliberately distinctive sentences in the ChatGPT box and look at them immediately before pressing Enter. If the duplication is already visible there, ChatGPT isn't responsible. If it looks correct until you send it and then I receive a duplicated word, that's much more interesting.

Since you're using Firefox on Windows, I'd first suspect an extension or input mechanism rather than the spell checker itself. Firefox's built-in spell checker normally underlines words; it doesn't ordinarily insert duplicate words.

If it happens again, don't correct it before sending—let me see the exact duplicated text. A few examples might reveal a pattern (for instance, whether it happens after punctuation, spaces, pasting, or particular words).

I don't use the Firefox spellchecker but something that calls itself "AI Grammar Checker and Paraphraser - Language Tool

Ah—LanguageTool is a much stronger suspect. It isn't merely a spellchecker; its browser extension actively analyzes and can modify text in editable fields, including ChatGPT's prompt box.

The duplicated words you're seeing could plausibly be coming from it, particularly if the extension is trying to correct or reprocess text as you're typing.

A very easy test:

    Temporarily disable LanguageTool in Firefox.

    Start a new ChatGPT message.

    Type normally for a while—don't paste anything.

    See whether the mysterious repetitions disappear.

You don't need to uninstall it. In Firefox, click the Extensions (puzzle-piece) button → LanguageTool → Manage Extension, and switch it off temporarily.

If the repetitions stop, we've found the culprit. You can then decide whether to re-enable it and adjust its settings, or simply leave it disabled on ChatGPT.

And actually, the example you gave—“to him him,it was”—is quite suggestive of an automated text-processing problem. Ordinary typing mistakes tend to produce misspellings or omitted letters; an exact repeated word is more characteristic of something interacting badly with the text field.

If you'd like, I can also
help you configure LanguageTool so that you can keep using it on ordinary websites but exclude ChatGPT.

Oh that last thing would be easy but undesirable.  I like it much more than what Firefox provides as it offers alternative spellings and I just choose one.

Ah, then don't disable it globally. If LanguageTool is doing something useful for you, the better solution is to figure out whether its ChatGPT integration is causing the occasional duplication and, if so, tame that rather than throwing the whole thing overboard.

And I understand why you prefer it. The distinction is important: a basic spellchecker says essentially “wrong.” LanguageTool says “here are several possibilities; you choose.” That's much more useful when you're typing quickly and occasionally can't quite summon the spelling you want.

One thing I'd try before changing anything: when you notice a duplicated word, don't immediately delete it. Tell me exactly what happened and, if possible, whether the duplicate was visible in the prompt box before you clicked Send.

If it turns out LanguageTool is responsible, there may be a setting that prevents it from doing the more aggressive automatic corrections while retaining its suggestions and alternative spellings. That would be the ideal arrangement.

And frankly, given that you are perfectly capable of deciding whether your word is better than LanguageTool's suggestion, I'd want to preserve that feature. 😉