t-3

 the morning was pretty smooth, then we had a guy come over to look at the apartment, in a hurry to find a place to live by sunday and seemingly a decent dude. so with much enthusiasm, we all seem to be proceeding and i'm praying it "takes" and things go smoothly 🙏

not only would this relieve us of two months' costs, but he also might buy our sofa, which would make our lives easier.

the rest of the day was a back-and-forth between the new apartment, the current one, and the office; the electrician did a huge, really good job of installing a tri-phase plug underneath the hob (going over the entire cabinet to minimize drilling into it, and he sorted out a bunch of other things.

unfortunately, while he was working gd discovered a leak - unrelated to him, and apparently unrelated to the plumber. but the plumber had been in the day before, so it was a whole story getting him to come in again... at least it seems like he gave us a discount on the replacement tap (he keeps trying to upsell us, it's kinda unsettling).

i had a chat with the new landlord, and it was such a positive experience - in spite of the costs he's really grateful that we're taking care of his property, and he's shocked to learn what his previous tenants haven't been reporting. meanwhile, while the apartment still has a few things that need fixing up, it feels like all the urgent stuff has been taken care of.

tomorrow we're meeting there with the window guy (just for him to evaluate the situation), and then we're going to buy an electric hob, and then we're going to make sure we have all the primer/paint and equipment we need to ensure the (🤞) incoming tenant is happy, and then we're going to do an early handover with the landlord, which means we might even be able to get a chunk of the awkward-to-move stuff across over the weekend.

...

even though i spent so much of my day juggling between the apartments and the office, i managed to evaluate the n-gram package against a much larger sample set and was ready to report high confidence just in time for the status meeting. the "customer" team lead asked me to try to make sure i'm not going to come back on tuesday to any big surprises, so i had a sync with one of my teammates and we came up with a strategy that we're both interested in seeing happen, and he agreed to "do me a favor" and run some tests in my absence.

i also had a really interesting conversation with the slipknot-not-synthknot guy, who i learned was actually a film student originally.

after putting mr smear to bed, i sat down to try and log my hours for my employer for the first time. i initially did it accurately, but it looks like i won't get paid fairly if i do, so i've normalized my days and i guess i'll find out if i did something wrong in the coming days.

...

the only real choice i got to make today was taking mr smear out for a laffa. not only did we both enjoy the walk and the meal, but we had some interesting conversations along the way. which led to an hilarious moment after we got home: he'd asked me about estrogen ("is estrogen real?"), and i'd ended up explaining to him how fetuses begin both male and female. but gd didn't know that we'd talked about this, and the look on her face when he suddenly yelled from the bathroom "DAD! I CAN FEEL WHERE MY VAGINA CLOSED UP!" was absolutely priceless 🤣

...

gd has been doing an inordinate amount of physical work, and it's worrying me. i understand that she's very sensitive regarding hygiene, and that she wants things to be "just right" when we move, but she's also been doing all the packing and sorting and i'm worrying about her back and pain levels... and she's been struggling for a while with some of the medications she's been on :(

t-4

 there's so much stuff happening, i'm sure i'm forgetting important notes along the way.

today began peacefully, with dishes, and moon knight, and interesting conversation* with mr smear.

* although we did have a serious argument when he told me i'm a hypocrite. i'm a lot of things, but i'm pretty sure i'm not a hypocrite. and besides, i'd only just explained to him what a hypocrite is.

it ended peacefully, with mr smear laughing until he choked multiple times while i read some more of the colour of magic to him (i'm thinking he's finally ready for it), and completing my employer's onboarding, and dishes, and having gd wake up to my howl of distress to advise me to put a glove on to retrieve the sink filter that i dropped into a particularly gross bin situation.

...

we arrived at the new apartment just before the plumber's brother did. we walked through the work that needed doing, and he pointed out that three taps needed replacing, not just one. and then he and his brother quoted me for the work, and my jaw dropped.

the landlord agreed to him taking care of the pipes, but didn't want to replace the taps... "right now", he said. so i asked him if we could make an arrangement, that i'd pay for the taps now and he'd pay me back later. and he agreed, and i rejoiced.

our friend/neighbor came down (she brought coffee) and joined us for a while, and when i felt i wasn't needed any more i headed to the office. when the plumber's brother was done and they were all heading out, she noticed something wrong with one of the kitchen windows - it doesn't latch, and we're currently in the middle of a storm with high winds and plenty of wet.

the good news (to my mind) is that the landlord's acknowledged this issue, so i guess it's clearly (again, to my mind) his fault if the floors get damaged. in the meanwhile, i managed to get our window guy from a few months ago to come in tomorrow afternoon, hopefully he'll come up with a solution that makes everyone happy 🤞

at the same time, while i was in the apartment i managed to get the electrician we used a while back to agree to come in and install three-phase under the hot plates. the "under" part will be tricky, but that's a tomorrow problem...

also, the plumber's brother came up with a great suggestion that makes installing our water dispenser much less messy.

work was crazy today. i got in 45 productive minutes after i came in, but then immediately had to return to the apartment to help gd with the unpleasant woman who came to take another look. i arrived to a not-unpleasant vibe, and after she left gd informed me that of all the details of her life to come into play, this woman grew up in the same neighborhood in turkey that gd lived in for a year. apparently, that's a reason to play nice with us. or maybe it's just because she's desperate for the apartment...

i paid the plumber (who'd become antsy), i ate, and i returned to the office. i had a long meeting trying to explain to my bulgarian teammates what i was doing to fine-tune the model's guesses and enable them to share the workload, and then a shorter meeting with my local teammates (kind of), and during that meeting one of the guys (the slipknot-not-synthknot guy) confronted me about the n-gram detection. we agreed to work together to see if maybe i'd missed something.

by the end of the day - an hour and a half later, because i had to go home again for another viewing - we'd determined that while the "gold standard" n-gram detection that i was using was as shit as i'd remembered, that there's another one he'd used before that was much less shit. but more important than that, he'd revealed that the company officially supports a very specific set of languages, and his n-gram detector proved 100% accurate (on our small sample set) for all of them!

so that's very exciting news, and tomorrow's mission is now to test this detection on as many production samples as we can to establish its "good enough-ness".

...

gd's done an incredible amount of packing and cleaning (even if, in my opinion, she really doesn't need to invest so much in the cleaning) over the past few days, but we're now getting to a point where there's not a hell of a lot to eat or eat with :P

it's very strange seeing the layers of our lives that slowly built up over the last four years being rapidly peeled back to eventually reveal an empty apartment that shows practically no trace that we were ever here.

iran update

 oh, right! and ozdoc messaged me last night, once again inviting us to flee the potential danger of an iranian attack.

the situation really is bizarre. nobody knows what's going on. tousi tv is the only reliable source of information. everyone has theories.

hopefully the iranians won't attack. if they do, hopefully we'll have time to get to the in-apartment bomb shelter in the new apartment, and not have to go huddle in the asthma-inducing dust-and-stale-air choke room downstairs.

overload

 it scares me that today's tuesday. and that this coming weekend is our last one in this apartment, and that there are so many unknowns, so many things i might have forgotten to take care of.

and there are knowns, now, too. gd went in to the new apartment today to take photos, and she called our friend down to verify that under the gas plate, the cupboard smells like gas. after a literal hour trying to get a technician to come and take a look (the first forty minutes were spent talking to the wrong gas company), the guy came in and confirmed that there's no leak, that the gas is off, and that the gas plates are probably broken 🤦‍♂️

there're water issues, too. blocked drains all round, and the toilets don't flush properly. and damage under the kitchen sink. and a whole story with the "jacuzzi". so we now have a plumber coming in - scratch that, he's busy, a plumber's brother coming in - first thing tomorrow morning.

and with all this noise in the background, i had to bail on a couple of hours' work this afternoon. i feel like i'm making good progress though - i've figured out a decent way to compare "my" model's results with what's in production - but it's a long, manual process and it's full of surprises.

oh, and at lunch today my boss/client and my team were having a very strange conversation about alcohol, drugs and chronic illness and i couldn't figure out if i was following what they were saying or not.

i didn't even talk about how my day began, yet - dishes, and reading moon knight: what a completely insane experience, and i mean reading it, it's properly destabilizing. i can't believe mr smear read it already.

oh, yes: i don't know what came over me, but i told him a really dumb but funny joke that could be potentially offensive to white saviors. he thought it was hilarious, and then i had to caution him about not re-telling it and now i'm wondering if i'm going to get in trouble for it :P

after he left for school, i took care of a bunch of things and then gd and i walked to the bank. it was a beautiful morning, and a good opportunity for some time to just walk and talk.

this time everything went quickly and smoothly, gd signed what she had to sign and i picked up the chequebook. we then went our separate ways, and when i arrived at the office *just* in time for my daily, i saw that she'd gotten home and received a message from the bank informing her that she'd left her ID there... so she had an additional experience on top of having to spend the day keeping house and packing for the move.

dinner was very late, but it was amazing. gd made a great ramen, with a yo egg on top with a runny yolk. it was glorious.

mr smear, in addition to doing his hebrew homework before i'd let him read in english (we're doing a weird thing since yesterday, hopefully it's not a bad call), decided that he's exhausted all the english stuff he wants to read and, entirely voluntarily, to both his parents shock and amazement, picked up the hebrew translation of kazu kibuishi's amulet (הקמע) and is devouring it.

...

my brain is throbbing, it's past 10pm. i'm going to make myself a cup of tea, and attempt to complete my employer's onboarding. and hopefully, hopefully, get a reasonably good night's rest.

i mean... the nerves

 firstly, i'm tired, and i've just completed an hour and a half of my employer's onboarding because they're unhappy that i haven't done it yet, all the while feeling bitter that i started working for my client on the same day as my employer and i'm really overwhelmed. not to mention the fact that i'm completely ragged from all the moving things combined with handling mr smear.

to be fair, though, relative to this morning his behavior in the evening was great. he did only go to bed around 10pm, but that's because he had a lot of homework to do...

... it's amazing to us that once he was punished, he cooperated fully and had no issues with actually doing the work. i wish i could understand this.

...

the woman we were waiting for turned out to be a real piece of work. not only did she get pushy when i told her that 1pm was the cut-off, she then had the gall to start asking me why it was so important that go back to work on time!

my mom asked me why i didn't put the phone down on her at that point, to which i didn't have an immediate answer.

then she arrived literally a few minutes before 1pm. i asked her to remove her shoes, to which she responded that "it disgusts her". i explained that she's not coming into our home with her shoes on. she asked if we had animals, i said "no, but the landlords are okay with them".

"me too, but not in the house" she replied.

then she really pissed me off; she took one shoe off at the entrance, then took a step into the living room before taking off the other one. i asked her to move the shoe to the entrance, to which she rudely responded "what do you care?"

at this point, i should have kicked her out, possibly throwing her shoes out the front door and down the stairs first. but i didn't. she took a quick look around, asked a couple of questions, and then i told her it was time to go.

it was only later that i really thought about it; if it wasn't worth two months' rent to me, there's no way i would have tolerated that behavior, but in the current situation it really would be tantamount to saying "it's worth two month's rent to me to not have to deal with you."

i don't have two month's rent to burn.

anyway, later in the evening i agreed to talk to her again - i didn't want to hear her ugly, entitled, malignant-tumor-on-the-backside-of-humanity voice - and when she asked to see the apartment again, and i told her thursday morning between 8 and 9, she said that it's too difficult for her because she has to go to work...

... do you know that feeling, when you come up with the perfect response hours or days too late? that's not what happened to me. immediately, i wanted to fire back "what, do you have a meeting or something? why can't you just go later?" like she did to me.

i'm feeling extremely proud of myself for keeping my mouth shut. honestly, i hope she does want the apartment, and that our shitty landlords agree to sign her on. they all deserve each other. but at the same time, it would give me great pleasure to tell her that someone else has taken it.

but now that i think about it, it would give me even greater pleasure to wait until she and the landlords have signed, and i have our deposit in hand, to tell her "good luck, you're going to need it."

...

the rest of the work day went pretty positively, even though i was half an hour late to a half an hour meeting that i didn't realize was happening.

at 4pm i joined a meeting i'd been invited to with some guys from my employer, without understanding what it was or why i was invited. it turned out to be a game design session, and while it was an engaging meeting and they definitely appreciated my contributions, i really don't think this one in particular is for me. i also couldn't really afford the hour out of my day, especially not today.

home - homework - dinner - shower - toenail treatment (i hope i'm not imagining things, but i feel like there's some improvement) - homework - employer onboarding - posting - my brain hurts and i need to go to bed soon.

...

ran gvili's body has been recovered, his family (and the rest of us) can get a little bit of closure now that his body can be buried with dignity.

impatience

 we had a rough start to the day today. mr smear regressed to being very uncooperative in doing his homework (due tomorrow) until we were furious and he lost his reading privileges again. we're all upset, and i don't understand why it's so hard for him to understand the english we're speaking to him.

anyway, no-one came for the first viewing session, and i'm now waiting for the woman who agreed to see the apartment between 12 and 1pm and just messaged to ask if it's okay if she comes at 1pm.

i don't understand why i have to explain to a grown adult that that's not what we agreed on.

the work day's been going alright so far, i guess. though it feels like the deeper i go into the world of language detection, the more pathetic the results.

the drain

 yesterday:

you know what's a surprisingly good feeling? when i arrive to pick up mr smear after 7.5 hours with his friend and he's clearly bummed out that their time is over.

the return home with was really fun.

it was an easy evening, i read some the colour of magic (we've restarted it, i hope he's ready for it this time) at bedtime and then the evening went into a bunch of random stuff, not least of which being writing up my earlier LLM experience into an article.

today:

i struggled to sleep last night.

the morning started off pretty well, and when mr smear left gd and i launched into removing the paintings from the walls and getting the screws / fisher plugs out. and realizing that *i* was guilty of mixing posidriv and phillips screws throughout the apartment :$

i took care of a bunch of other small things, and then left for the bank to organize a bank guarantee.

...

it's 2026 already. we have ai, robots, and a new evolution of CRISPR, but there i found myself, walking out of the bank after TWO HOURS signing arbitrary pieces of paper to acquire a document allowing me to promise my own money to someone else 😒

and then, OMFG.  just as i got on the bus to get to the office, i received an sms from the bank saying that my chequebook is available for pickup 😡

...

the bank experience really drained me. i got to the office, drank a coffee, and got back to working on my language detection model. i did that for an hour, then had lunch with the other dev who was working from the office, and then he left. i got some more work done before the only other person in the office, who was on the complete other side of it, lost his temper with someone on the phone. i tried not to eavesdrop, ending up suspecting that he'd been yelling at his kids :P

the work itself went sideways. first, when after two days of investment into testing this model, and some apparently good guesswork about some of the bigger languages (french and german, amongst others), i discovered that the model couldn't distinguish between english and russian. at that point, the mapping no longer mattered and i stopped what i was doing to investigate the existing solution.

that was when i learned that the elasticsearch language detection model isn't very reliable either, and that my client has a fair amount of garbage detections in its dataset. i also learned that i have a real advantage in evaluating language detections models because i'm familiar enough with quite a few very different languages.

so the model i've been evaluating is out, though i have infrastructure available to evaluate others (if i can find any reliable ones with labels), and i've established that there's no point in training our own model on our production data. i'm probably going to have to find out how n-gram language detection stacks up...

i left early myself and caught a bus home, authorizing mr smear to go with his friend to the comics library and on to his place. that made it easier for gd and i to go to the new apartment to sign the contract.

we were there for quite a while, it's looking considerably better, and this guy's really giving good vibes as a landlord. i didn't realize how hard it would be for him to grip a pen (he's very handicapped), and there were clauses that neither of us could figure out who should do what with...

we left with a key so gd and i can get started, cleaning it up and moving small things, and taking pre-inspection photos and organizing whatever fixes he missed.

i dropped my bag off at home, then walked to the square to wait for mr smear. he didn't need me to do that.

when we got home he dropped a bombshell - he and his friend watched the first episode of rick & morty today 🤦‍♂️

i fired off a message to his friend's dad - he's never seen the series - explaining that i understand that we'll never have full control, but that i'd appreciate it if his son understands that it's wrong and that he shouldn't share it with mr smear... he responded quickly and warmly, i hope we align.

mr smear has long hebrew homework due tuesday, so after a brief debrief on the rick & morty episode we got through a chunk of it and then had dinner, and then got through the shower/bedtime rituals (showering without a shower curtain again), and after getting mr smear into bed* i got caught up in getting gd's ipad upgraded, which led to some yak shaving in an attempt to free up enough space, which eventually led to an understanding that it's not possible to update the ipad software and apple's successfully coercing us to either abandon it or trade it in.

i fucking HATE apple.

* it took him forever to go to sleep, though

i'm absolutely exhausted, i think i need to go to bed. i hope i actually get some sleep tonight.

going around in circles

i feel like i'm trapped between rocks and hard places.

i have a sinking feeling that i'm out of time for the embedded model solution i've been working on, but at the same time i have the boss *strongly* encouraging me to continue and i do feel like i'm *almost* there.

last night the woman from the morning contacted me to say the apartment's too small for her.

i had a rough night last night, the new cream doesn't seem to be doing its thing. gd was up all night too, so we were both a bit miserable this morning...

mr smear, meanwhile, woke up just a little *too* excitable and loud :/

for both him and me, the early morning was predominantly about moon knight and getting the midi device playing nicely with garageband.

then we hopped on a weekend bus to his friend's place, and i moseyed on to the museum (picking up a coffee next to habima on the way), and i spent about three hours tinkering with local LLM development until my battery almost died.

i came home for a while, now i'm on my way to pick up my boy and return home again.

delicacy

 night has fallen, the candles are lit, the challah-peño dough is rising. i have a shot glass of rum i'm slowly sipping, and tool's lateralus album is playing, and mr smear is on the couch behind me reading moon knight after having finished the hebrew translation of lightfall.

nobody knows what's happening with iran and china tonight, or tomorrow night, or next week, but we're happy and grateful to have a calm moment right here, right now.

...

mr smear struggled last night and all day with a stuffy nose, but we had a really nice morning together and he was well enough to go to school. then someone came to look at the apartment and decided she wanted to proceed - coming in on the 1st was a problem, but gd and i talked it over and we agreed that the 15th was acceptable. not only does it mean someone taking over our obligations, but it gives us a couple of weeks' breathing room which is meaningful.

gd and i took a bus to the school, which was packed with families milling around appreciating all the artwork. mr smear guided us through his grade's stuff, he only had two pieces on display but they were really good, and we were amazed by a lot of what we saw - there're a lot of really talented kids there.

aside from the awkward horror of watching one of his friends' train-wreck family in action, and a couple of awkward moments with some other parents as well, it was a very good experience for all.

and then i managed to corner mr smear's teacher for an impromptu parent-teacher discussion, and confirmed that she's noticed and is appreciative of mr smear's efforts to sort himself out over the past week or two 🙏

mr smear got gd to point and laugh just as a bunch of his classmates were told "NO" when they were trying to leave early without adult supervision, and it was awkward for everyone.

we took the light rail to the hospital complex on the way home, stumbling upon an actual spar along the way and buying delicious candy-like dried strawberries, amongst other things, and then it was time for pharmacy and shopping. the pharmacy took a ridiculously long time, but mr smear set himself up in the food court and worked on his new comic idea.

once gd and i were done, we had lunch (i'd been passing out from exhaustion, but i managed to scarf down 

[pause mid-sentence to fight with my wife over "letting" mr smear read moon knight - he just asked me what "evisceration" means - after i explained that i already told him i haven't read it and i don't approve of him reading it. i can't force him. gd just asked if there's any sex stuff in it, and he said no, so she just raised her hands and gave up]

a really good falafel pita (mr smear had a "salad pita", gd sampled the rice with peas and dill she bought for the weekend) and then we walked home.

the rest of the afternoon had been pretty relaxed, and hopefully the shabbat will be too 🤞🙏

...

right, those dried strawberries aren't going to eat themselves.

the brain slimes out the headcase

i woke up from a strange dream where i reconnected with my first branch commander and his family out in the middle of nowhere. when i got up i couldn't remember his name, but firefighter came to the rescue and i could return to a reality in which it really doesn't matter :P

 today began with an argument over the couch, which *i* had thought we were keeping, and which i'm now scrambling to sell before the move. and i tried to put our mattress on facebook marketplace, but because i used the word "orthopaedic" it was identified as medical equipment.

i could only ask for a review on the grounds of "it's not offensive in my country" and "it was a joke",  and the review was obviously just as automated as the original misclassification. and then, to make things worse, i couldn't edit or delete it because it had been flagged, and i couldn't re-create it either because it was detected as a duplicate 🤦

a sweet couple came to look at the apartment this morning, right after i returned from the hardware store with putty and shpachtel and a replacement showerhead for our last week because ours sprung a leak last night, and they absolutely loved it and we all really clicked over our rick & morty and adventure time pictures on the walls.

i arrived at work a bit later than usual, fielded a call from a scary-looking woman who asked incisive questions, and then dived into work.

...

work today - aside from forcing myself to take a lunch break - was completely ridiculous. as a hired "expert", i probably shouldn't be reveling out loud in the fact that this is my first mlops experience, but my gods, this is a discipline of complete masochists and/or trolls.

my first success was navigating the docker resources required to actually run a model in an ml instance, and the next was figuring out how to request predictions. but then i had to deal with logits and understand that the model i was using didn't include the labels it was trained with. so the data scientist who helped me yesterday jumped in enthusiastically to help, and the two of us were like kids trying to find buried pirate treasure with a riddle of instructions and no idea which map they referred to. or whether or not that map was accurate.

by the end of the day, we'd managed to synthesize a massive dataset of sample sentences (in 235 different languages) manually using google sheets and gemini, and we'd coerced a cursor agent to run a script against the deployed model that took our dataset plus a guessed label mapping and try to figure out what the mapping *should* look like, and we were surprised and amazed when the first iteration showed a fair amount of success and gave us a great starting point.

just before i called it a day - it was already much later than i'd intended to stay in the office, and my brain felt like it was oozing out my ears and nostrils - my boss/client appeared. we enthusiastically caught him up, but he didn't like my original plan, which was to give the project until the end of today and then make a call to use a temporary fallback to avoid blocking an end-of-next-week delivery.

"you should be more optimistic", he told me.

now i'm at a point where i know i'm not going to work over the weekend, but it's going to be bugging me that i might need to work over the weekend in order to make this deadline.

...

i walked home, had a very serious discussion with mr smear (he made a bad call today, and may have initiated some real bullying by some kids in his class), but then moved on to more positive things and dinner and showertime and bedtime were great.

i'm sure i'm forgetting something, but it's late and i need to chill a little.

...

it’s (hopefully) mr smear's second-last day of his no-reading punishment. yesterday i told him that if he reads hebrew it counts as homework, not reading time, and he’s embraced that loophole and is thoroughly engrossed in a hebrew graphic novel i bought a while back :P