retrograde

i just read the disease of optionality: why smart people stay poor before dinner, i'm in that article and i don't like it. i've been saying for a long time that i'm constantly working on a million things at once, and this article has made me realize i need to stop and focus. especially now, this couldn't have been a more timely intervention.

...

emotionally, today was rough. i'm a mess. but in retrospect it was nonetheless a pretty good shabbat. i finished writing up an article on using AI to build models in freecad and blender, even though i'm not thrilled by how my print model came out.

then we headed out in the rain - with our broken umbrellas from last winter - to meet with a friend from cape town who's here on a program for a couple of weeks. she brought mr smear watercolors and a really good quality sketch book, which he showed genuine gratitude for, and we talked non-stop until she had to go, and gd had consumed too much caffeine :P

after we got home, ate breakfast and relaxed for a bit, mr smear - with a lot of patient harassment - helped me wash the floors, after which we sat down to watch akira.

the movie is not the same as the manga. there's a scene where one of the girls is "lightly" violated, and holy shit, we had to have a talk about what we'd just seen. the violence is intense, but after total recall, well... 🤷‍♂️

i took mr smear out to throw the frisbee again, and it was a fantastic opportunity to talk about some serious stuff; afterwards, we took our now "traditional" little walk over the bridge and around to return home, and mr smear confided in me that he doesn't know how to process the fact that as anti-sport as he is, he's enjoying rollerblading and frisbee 🥹

while doing a bit of cloud-watching, he also came up with something inappropriate that made me feel bad for laughing, so i made a meme of it (which he's not happy about, he doesn't like my concept for his joke nor the fact that i used AI to generate it):

anyway, i made a model of it, perhaps he'll be able to do something with it:

after showering, we watched the wonder years over dinner, and every episode just amazes me more and more that something of this calibre and this educational value ever made it on air for so long. it's magic.

we chatted with my mom, and then i read a little bit more of the light fantastic to mr smear, who called me a "weenie" because i started falling asleep while reading again :P

...

right now i'm not sure if i'm clearing my desk, thinking about focusing, or going to bed.

a path less travelled

 maybe i am stupid.

i mean, this certainly isn't the first time i've mused on this, but the fact of the matter is that most of my life - honestly, some of the biggest moments of my life - is based on dramatic series of poor decisions. in most cases, i've kind of come out on top alright, but not for any particularly good reason. providence, i guess.

here i am, it's saturday morning, early enough that the streets are mostly empty and i'm surrounded by the blind-friendly ticking of a pedestrian crossing and occasional engine noises* and a glorious orange-cloud sunrise, the air calm and cool enough for me to be wearing a vest, and gd and mr smear (apparently) asleep.

* a surprising number of non-electric vehicles, which feels weird after yesterday's spectacular reveal of tesla's "flying" "roadster".

here i am, trying to do damage control and figure my way out of living beyond my means, struggling to make a decision because my resume can't handle me looking for a new job right now, but also i can't professionally and in good conscience leave a new contract i've barely begun without burning my employer, and moving apartments right now would be a nightmare, and it's unlikely to find a viable one in tel aviv that's cheaper anyway, and we can't leave tel aviv without pulling mr smear out of a school that's legitimately good for him both socially and artistically...

a sports car zooms by, a crow cries, and here i am, typing this up and sipping on my coffee and wondering whether i have what it takes to pull myself up by my bootstraps - an apt expression for the sheer impossibility that it seems to be - and find a way forward.

...

here comes the sun.

...

thursday:

thursday was a work from home day. while wednesday was fulling of hitting walls, thursday was awkwardly, slowly, sliding up and around them. my AI context seems a lot more reliable, but being thorough demands running a lot of long prompt sessions which means a lot of (human) evaluation, recalibration, and then a lot more waiting until the next cycle of the loop. it makes for long days, and an almost arbitrary level of productivity, but i did feel like i ended the day with a sense of accomplishment.

...

in the early afternoon, the landlord's air conditioner guy arrived. he checked out the ducts, and arrived at the conclusion that we don't have a mold problem, just a dust problem, and i *hope* his assessment is correct. either way, his explanation of our experience made sense, so we're going to follow the new protocol and see how it goes: for heat, air conditioner only goes on *cold*, colder than outside and colder than 24°, and immediately afterwards we use fan mode to keep the humidity out of the ducts from condensing.

i still haven't received a response from the landlord after i sent him an update.

...

i still haven't received a response from the pain clinic doctor regarding the cannabis license renewal. i guess we're going to have to make an appointment.

...

the tax return situation: i acted on a couple of recommendations, and got good responses. it turns out the 15% fee the not-quite-nigerian scammer eventually settled on is a standard fee. i ended up going with dod's guy, hopefully they'll find something.

...

we watch the wonder years' "how i'm spending my summer vacation" over dinner, continuing to solidify what a remarkable, wonderful, helpful series it is. mr smear gets really upset by kevin arnold's behavior, so much so that he just wants us to turn it off...

yesterday.

... but then, like yesterday, it turns out to provide a perfect analogy to explain to him why his own behavior is problematic. halfway through the day i lost my temper with him because he started telling me off for not helping him with his chores, while i'm trying desperately to keep my shit together to find ways to feed my family. a little later, when i'd calmed down, gd suggested that it was kind of like how kevin was focused on his little problems while others' worlds were burning, and i sat down with mr smear to calmly discuss it. as soon as i talked about last night's episode he *got* it, and immediately thanked me (and gd) for making is clear :)

...

that was only one thing that upset me, though. i spent most of the morning and early afternoon upset with mr smear about something else... for years now, i've been telling him to keep his phone in his bag when he's not actively using it, and he's been refusing to listen. a few months ago mr smear cost us a phone by washing it after dropping it in a urinal - this was upsetting enough before we learned that we're in financial distress - yesterday morning his friend shoved him (or something) and he dropped his phone and it died.

oh, fuck :/

...

gd and i bussed to a supermarket in yad eliyahu (i don't think i've ever been there before) for friday shopping (and to use the gift card i received before the holidays), and i'm pretty confident it's the best one in the city. we had a pretty good experience getting what we needed, caught a bus home (a long ride, with stress after we'd been talking about potentially having to move house again), and then bussed to pick mr smear up from school.

i took with me a couple of our old phones, and after picking mr smear up (and being frustrated by him making us wait outside for ten minutes and then eventually go in looking for him) we caught a bus to a phone repair store, which turned out to be the guy from my old (pre-canada) neighborhood who i thought had closed shop, but had merely moved to the other side of the road.

of the phones i brought with, one didn't need any work done (it suddenly sprang back to life with 70+% battery after we plugged it in), two of them i left with him for evaluation, and the rest (i don't remember if that's one or two) he told us weren't worth the cost of trying to fix. what worked out well for us is that the one that came back to life was mr smear's previous phone (from before our experiment to use paybox before understanding that it's a scam), so after only a little bit if fiddling i was able to hand it to him, fully useable.

...

i spent most of the afternoon just processing and thinking, while experimenting with freecad and blender. by late afternoon i'd managed to hook them up to AI and gotten results that weren't amazing, but were pretty damned good nonetheless.

...

before sundown, i took mr smear to the park and we threw the frisbee around. with everything else that's going on, it was fantastic. we both got some exercise, we both had fun, and mr smear actually did surprisingly well. it was an experience to treasure.

...

after getting home and getting showered, it was time for kiddush with my mom. gd's gnocci dinner was great, we watched some interesting nature "documentaries" on youtube, and after we'd all eating our fill, we settled down to watch the original total recall.

i read through some of the other reviews, and apparently remembered this movie with less than total recall, because i decided my 11 year old could handle it.

let's address the sexual stuff first: there's so much, from the get-go, and it's SO inappropriate. not just inappropriate for an 11 year old, inappropriate for real human beings - from the hyper-sexual wife responding to her husband's nightmares and literally anything else, to the relationship between  ironside's character and his wife, to the cabby fondling the woman's breasts while waiting for quaid. it's weird, and boy, did that lead to a couple of conversations.

but then there's the violence. we're usually not that concerned with violence, but total recall goes far beyond what i remembered and is truly hardcore. gratuitous and extreme.

it's a phenomenal movie, really fun, full of iconic moments and with lots to think about, but i do wish we'd waited a few more years.

i put mr smear to bed afterwards; he wasn't that bothered by the sex and violence, but the mutants in the movie freaked him out 🙄

friction and the not-quite-nigerian scam

 today was messy. i slept pretty well, and loved reading some more of akira before screen time.

i'm really struggling with my various side projects, not only to make time to work on them, but to find mental bandwidth. add to that the stress of having paid the larger amount which adds pressure to make good use of it, and i'm... doing... great...

i fired off an email to gd's pain doctor regarding prescribed doses, and i'm hoping we don't have to go see him in person 🤞

the work day was long, and difficult. it felt like every round of PR reviewing and updating was backfiring worse than the round before, and it was only in the afternoon, having pitched my setup to one of my team, that i learned that my AI tooling setup was ignoring something critical that really could have made all the difference :/

so as much progress as i felt i was making yesterday, today i felt like i'd hit a wall.

the only positive work day experience was a tech circle meeting in which i actually was able to contribute. that was a huge relief.

...

a while back i received an offer of assistance with tax refunds, and this morning i responded. the guy called me up, and asked for a whole lot of my personal details, and i was starting to wonder if i was being scammed when he divulged that he's actually nigerian... nigerian iraqi, living up north, and according to everything i've seen his business is legit. but. he takes enormous percentages from his clients, so i'm trying to find someone whose terms and conditions are a little less unreasonable.

...

back and forth with the air conditioner guy, and this evening he was saying "it would only take ten minutes", and i suddenly realized we were not talking about the same thing. he then spoke to our landlord, and then the landlord sent me a flurry of upset messages because he's having a hard time financially too and he was not expecting such a huge cost, and he's (understandably) pissed off that he paid a lot of money for a mold clean that didn't clean all the mold.

...

mr smear went to a friend's after school today, which he said was a super-short visit and that most of their time together had been spent on the bus there, awkwardly not really speaking.

kids these days.

gd and i had to threaten him with pretty severe punishments to get him to finish his book report, but he did do it, and he did a really good job.

then it was dinner time, gd having celebrated us getting our stove back, with four hot sauces and two episodes of evangelion. it was a good dinner.

after showering and brushing teeth, i read some more of the light fantastic to mr smear, then sat down in front of my computer to poke the AI and do not much of value.

now i'm drinking my last tea and planning on climbing into bed.

momentum

 whatever else is going on, i woke up feeling better this morning. i started my day reading akira, the artwork is stunning and the story is... a bit different from what i remember from the movie, but i haven't seen the movie in forever so...

i began my functional day ordering hand-vacuum filters off of ali express, and unboxing the reflective straps i picked up yesterday. we found our sharpies, but then i discovered that sharpies and white-out don't mix, and then gd realized that she could mix up acrylic paint and did an excellent job of color-matching on our bathroom tiles 👍

[pausing to go and watch gd eating sunflower seeds, i was honestly convinced that she was somehow doing it wrong and now i'm trying to figure out how i've never seen her eating them before]

i walked to work a little anxiously, expecting another cyclist/motorcyclist incident in the walkway and identifying more with the poor old guy who was so angry about it a couple of weeks ago.

there were no signs, nothing indicating that there was a problem with the road i normally cross to get into the office, and i splashed down into what was either mud, or cement, and it went into my sandals.

i - was - pissed.

i tried not to track whatever it was into the office, which was nigh impossible, and found myself awkwardly and embarrassingly standing on a bunch of paper towels while washing my sandals off in the bathroom sink. not the greatest start to the workday.

work itself was fine, though. i made progress, and am feeling a bit of momentum, i had a pleasant roadmap meeting with my mentor, lunch was good (my onboarding buddy and i had a long chat about the differences in professional culture and work/life balance between the big companies), and i'm feeling pretty solid about my dev setup and the task i'm doing.

oh, and i had coffee with my old friend from the officer's course, and learned that's he's doing really cool hobbyist stuff with home automation and 3D printing. like, really cool stuff.

...

i received a call from the medical cannabis people, apparently there isn't an issue with gd getting a larger quantity per month. i really, really hope that's true 🤞

...

it sucked that the air conditioner guy couldn't make it this afternoon - or tomorrow, either - but it did give me the opportunity to go and hear eli sharabi speak. holy shit, that was an intense hour and a half. the fact that he's doing what he's doing and is maintaining the attitude that he's maintaining is nothing short of miraculous. there's no detail of his story that isn't devastating and heartbreaking.

...

i came home in time for dinner, and after discussing what i'd heard we dived in to another episode of evangelion. mr smear actually ate most of the chili, i didn't cry when i took too much carolina reaper sauce, and then it was shower / teeth / bedtime and i read a bit more of the light fantastic.

i couldn't figure out how i was feeling and i certainly wasn't being focused, so gd and i watched another episode of fauda, and i think i'm going to try for a (relatively) early night.

adventures in uncertainty

 what a weird day. the only times i went outside were to pick up reflective straps i'd ordered online (i haven't even opened the packages yet) and to take out the trash. the sky dripped a few drops on me along the way, but otherwise my time outside was uneventful and insufficient to constitute exercise.

from a health and wellness point of view, i'm not okay. i'm convinced that it's psychological, and that i'm just burned out and depressed.

...

i finished the first evangelion book this morning, and it is magnificent. or... manganificent?

i came across this at the library, and excitedly brought it home - only halfway through did i fully register that it's an adaptation of the series, not the other way around, but it's an adaptation with so much heart and soul!

all the little shifts really pull the series' threads more tightly together and make it not just emotionally powerful, but much more intellectually accessible. i recommend watching the original series first, but either way this is a fantastic book.

we watched the third episode over dinner, it was awesome.

...

i worked from home today, and i sat too long in my office chair. which i'm still sitting too long in, i guess. i'd to say i worked hard, but that expression's been slowly losing all meaning over the course of the year. we had an interesting online group meeting with my employer this afternoon, and one of the questions was "what do you do between prompts?".

well, i had an answer, but it depends on the kind of work i'm doing. for personal stuff, i'm usually messing with other projects while waiting for the response, so i cycle between them. for paid stuff, i'm usually either upgrading my "software factory", as one of my group put it, by improving my skills and refining my tooling setup, or i'm reading through the previous round's changes to get "closer to the source".

i went through a lot of that, today.

on a silly note, i misheard one of the group as we were all saying goodbye, and felt obliged to produce the following:

...

mr smear seems to have had a good day. fortunately or unfortunately, gd came to me today with the book report on maus he's been working on, and it said some disturbing things about the holocaust. so when he got home, we sat down to talk about it... he explained himself pretty well, and we're not alarmed any more, but in addition to coaching him on the language he uses to describe things (he "got it" pretty quickly), we're now planning a family trip to yad vashem. considering the fictional darkness he's already been exposed to i think he'll be able to handle it, and we want him to see and feel the reality and the human faces behind the numbers and clinical grim details.

...

i spent a lot of time thinking about investments today, i'm nervous about having all of our deposit money in indexes that may or may not crash. i've learned enough about investment and economics to be well into the valley of despair, so i don't trust any advice or theories on the internet but both sides make compelling arguments.

after thinking out loud and talking through a plan with my mom and gd after dinner, i decided to pull a chunk of money out of the traditional indexes, put some of it into an israel fund that includes real estate, and withdraw the rest to my bank account... in another few days i'm going to go in person to try and put that money away (along with the bonus i received) in a way that makes sense.

...

gd and i seem to be okay, but i'm still having moments of disconnection, still processing my feelings about the other night.

...

i've spent the past couple of hours working on security for one project and blockchain architecture for another, and it's approaching midnight already. i think i'm ready to call it a day.

the bubble

 i know enough about investment theory to know how little i understand, how little anyone understands. i know just enough to be helpless to make a decision when faced with a market full of noise, half doomsaying and freaking out that the AI bubble's about to burst, half calling for calm rationality and assuring everyone that things will get better, and that if there's going to be a crash it'll be sometime next year.

i don't know what to do about our deposit money. i should probably take half of it out and put it into something "safer". or maybe hedge it.

fuck.

...

gd and i left the apartment along with mr smear, and made the mistake of following the transport app's suggested route. we arrived about fifteen minutes later than planned for our meeting with the head dentist, but it didn't matter because she wasn't there anyway. the woman who was there - the office manager - was a right bitch. rude, obstructive, and it took everything in my power to not lose my shit while gd looked at me out of the side of her eyes, warning me not to let her get under my skin but amused that it was me getting upset and not here.

we left with an appointment to return in the afternoon, meaning they successfully burned my morning pre-office work time that i really, really need, as well as a good couple of hours out of my client hours in the afternoon which i also really, really need...

at least the head dentist was there when we returned, and even better, she speaks english so gd didn't need me to translate. she heard gd out, examined her, and sent us off with a recommendation to book an appointment with a periodontist.

according to gd, this *could* have been taken care of when we were in south africa and had dental health insurance, but the dentist magnanimously decided that it wasn't urgent enough.

smh.

...

work was pretty good, though the office was freezing and i sat shivering in my hoodie for a while before anyone else decided it was a problem worth looking into :P

on the one hand i'm frustrated by how much time it's taking getting PRs reviewed (my usual complaint), on the other it's giving me opportunities to learn more about the system and make better decisions 🤷‍♂️

...

at work, i received a phone call from mr smear's math teacher. he'd hit a girl 🤦‍♂️

BUT.

the teacher had borne witness to the provocation that came before it, and it was clear as day that while he should never be using force unless he's defending himself, the girls were messing with him non-stop and his response was, at the very least, understandable.

aside from validating his usual claims which we're often suspicious of, something else happened in the aftermath of the encounter: he surprised his teachers, and his parents, by taking responsibility, apologizing, and acknowledging that he had better options like coming to a teacher for help. this in itself was big, but in his conversation with his homeroom teacher and the councillor - who's the one who usually freaks out the most about his behavior - he was very open and direct, and i received a second phone call to discuss how mature he was being, and how together they'd realized that the kids were conflating "asking for help" with "snitching" (so we can have a conversation about that), and how mr smear's keeping his distance from his friend with the mouth; this is precisely what we advised him to do a couple of weeks ago, and it presented an opportunity to talk with the teacher about how these kids are interacting.

so that was good. we held a family meeting when we all got home, and mr smear was caught off guard because he was expecting to be punished; we made it clear that he'd crossed a line with the violence (no matter how soft it was in effect), but our focus was on how well he handled himself and how proud we were of him. i think this is the first time we've ever witnessed him allowing himself to be proud of himself, and it was an emotional moment for all of us!

then, in the evening, he reported something to gd - his friend with the mouth had said something absolutely beyond all boundaries "as a joke" (as usual), and this time i fired off a message to his mother. i was pleasantly surprised by her response, she handled it immediately, and i hope the effects are long lasting.

...

i worked until dinner, even though my brain was frying. we watched another episode of the fall and rise of reggie dinkins, which is really great, and i encouraged mr smear to finish the carrots he'd removed from dinner by rewarding him with a video about uploaded consciousness (well, sorta. the fruit fly brain being uploaded). i read some more of the light fantastic to him at bedtime, which is honestly consistently more polished and funny than the colour of magic.

by that stage of the evening i was falling apart. i spent about ten minutes working on a side project - planning a security strategy because i'm terrified of becoming successful enough to attract DOS or DOW attacks - then chatted with gd about our finances, then had a long catch up with my mom, and now... it's already later than i thought. i'm going to wind down and try to go to bed earlier than usual.

i feel sick

 i have no idea whether i'm sick or not, but i feel sick. weak. i'm probably not sick, though, and just feeling the effects of what's definitely and understandable depression. the following are my prime suspects for how i'm feeling at the moment:

1. the stress and adrenaline dump of last night's fight.

2. the financial distress combined with the general stress of all the things broken and wrong in this apartment (gd discovered this afternoon that the floor's lifting by the balcony door) and the fact that the landlord's barely communicating.

3. not eating well. i mean, i think i'm eating good quality food, but i'm not sure i'm eating enough and i'm struggling to control what i eat because i'm trying to lose a little weight. weight watching is complicated :/

having said all that, although getting to the beach and back on my rollerblades was proper exercise in significant heat and humidity, i felt fine at the beach with nystire and co and a friend we served with and his kids, and although some of the news was really heavy it was good seeing them and i had a good time.

...

i went to bed about an hour after my last post, and woke up about six hours later. i didn't feel particularly positive about the world, and i'm still processing some of things said and done last night. relationships are weird.

mr smear surprised me, though: his phone was ringing so i took it to him, apparently waking him up with a call from his friend. he answered, jumped out of bed, and quickly (much more quickly than we're used to) brushed his teeth (and presumably performed his ablutions), got dressed, packed his bag, and all i had to do was help him pack a chunk of the challah-peño into a tupperware container and accompany him to his friend's just in case he got lost.

it was a perfect opportunity to gauge how much last night fucked him up - he seems fine, we had a very reasonable conversation and then moved on - and just generally talk about the world. the day was already heating up, so i took a roundabout route home which was shadier, going through the museum park and then park hayarkon, and that gave me a little processing time too.

after burning tokens for a while, gd and i watched a few episodes of fauda, which were very stressful, and then i headed to the beach.

i got home a little bit before mr smear did: he'd been worried about coming home by himself, but not because he was afraid of getting lost. apparently - though she denies it - he saw a video with gd of a kid being kidnapped in tel aviv in broad daylight, so we've explained that he's clearly mistaken, and that he needs to always be careful, but never scared.

once he was out the shower we had a little time to play through his horror game, which is taking shape nicely, and then we ate dinner and watched another touching episode of the wonder years (harper's wood). my gods, that series is amazing.

we talked to my mom, who relieved us with news of shadowslight's dad who's just come out of surgery for an aneurysm and seems to be doing okay. i asked for financial advice, specifically regarding how much money (and time) i'm investing in all these AI projects. i wish i had some kind of indication as to whether the things i'm doing are potentially lucrative or a waste of time 🙄

it's very hard to think straight when you're under pressure, and that's exactly when you need to be able to do so the most.

broken plates

 i don't know which was more effective in waking me up, the extra coffee or having to confront the cleaning lady upstairs after she threw dirty soap water onto our balcony again.

i finally made some progress on my projects before mr smear came home from school, and then we all headed out to the mall to look for a halloween mask for him. and also a tri-phase wall socket for the borrowed electric stove, which of course the mall hardware center doesn't stock. we spent considerably more money on his costume than i'm comfortable with, and that's after i told gd that i'm debating with myself whether the current AI subscription is really worth it or not (i think i'm going to downgrade, but i've got mixed feelings about it).

i felt downright ill by the time we eventually got home, and after eating something in the hope it would make me feel better, i napped on the living room carpet (and a beanbag) for what must have been about 45 minutes. i did feel a bit better after.

the highlight of the evening came after kneading the challah-peño: i sat mr smear down and we watched the first couple of episodes of evangelion together. it was awesome ^_^

dinner was nice, gd was very proud of her polenta and tomato pesto sauce and it went surprisingly well with the challah-peño and avocado (we call it "soggy pizza" now). we had a long chat with my mom while we ate, and we were planning on watching a movie together afterwards.

we never watched anything. the past few hours were absolutely miserable, unhinged, and were damned near the end of me and gd. i think we're (somewhat) okay now, but we're all feeling traumatized, exhausted, and disconnected.

...

at least the games are coming along nicely...

catching flies

 it's funny, i seem to be sleeping okay this week, but i'm tiiiiiired. mentally exhausted. emotionally drained.

i really don't want to - and can't afford to - miss the opportunity to build more, write more, find ways out of the financial hole and create the stuff that i'm excited about. but this morning? and yesterday morning? ugh. it's a brain-fog, probably depression, and i can't even focus for long on reading evangelion (which i'm absolutely loving, not least because its producer notes very explicitly answer All The Questions).

maybe i should go a little harder on the caffeine today. fight it. push through it.

*yawns in sad and lazy*

maybe shinji's attitude is infecting me. i guess i'm pretty susceptible to something like that right now.

themes

 it's getting close to... oh, it is midnight. fine. today was a weird, unhealthily weird day. i've been sitting too much, eating too much, and i literally never went outside :/

i was woken up by mr smear's awful alarm being shoved in my face because neither he nor gd could figure out how to stop it when the phone is in downtime mode. i couldn't get back to sleep, and i remained decidedly unmotivated for a whi^H^H^H^H^Hpretty much the rest of the day :P

i started reading neon genesis evangelion, and i've immediately arrived at the conclusion that a) omg the manga is awesome but b) it's probably not quite as awesome if you haven't seen the anime.

i spent a bit of time on the phone with the dental clinic, the experience was shocking (although not as shocking as gd's failed root canal and her dentist's negligence) and i found myself both yelling at the receptionist and appealing to her humanity at the same time. apparently we can see the manager to complain in person on sunday morning...

my consulting coworker gave an hour long presentation today for her team's hackathon project during our client group's bi-weekly, half of which i was confused because something distracted me early and i didn't realize that zoom was showing her screen in a different tab. dammit. fortunately, i was wowed by their project on the day so i didn't have trouble following.

...

i received my payslip today, which thankfully included my bonus. i thought i'd be less disappointed if i didn't expect half of it to be taken as income tax, but now i see that it was literally half of the amount and i am disappointed. it's obviously far better than no bonus, though, so...

...

around noon a technician came for our electric stove. the one that we bought when we moved in. he took it off to the lab, refusing to give us even a general idea of how long we'd be without it :(

we are extremely lucky that our upstairs friends had a spare, although unfortunately our socket isn't regulation so we can't plug it in. but it does plug the hole in the counter, and we do have their portable stove for now, so... 🤷‍♂️

...

in the news, frontier models have been doing amazing things. i'm not talking about missing the point of math problems, although that's certainly interesting, but rather the crazy new game merging trend and someone (or a group of someones) finally getting some justice for decades of greedy abuse by adobe by "freeing" their software.

what a time to be alive.

having said that, *i* spent most of my workday using anthropic's newest frontier model, opus 5.5, struggling to get it to help me import a spreadsheet into my client's platform without it going off the rails, inventing problems that didn't exist, and just generally behaving badly.

it was a grind.

...

i had a little trouble with mr smear's attitude when he got home, but i managed to handle it and we had good results followed by a good talk. i had myself a nice glass of araq and started burning tokens - deliberately, in light of the fact that i'm about to try downgrading my subscription - making some interesting progress and coming up with a really cool idea for my sudoku game.

i stopped for dinner - the fall and rise of reggie dinkins is really fun - and a chat with my mom, read a little more of the light fantastic to mr smear, and then returned to the burn. gd restarted watching fauda, again, and because i've seen the first episode enough times i continued burning the whole time, jumping between different games. i'm using openai's latest frontier model, gpt-6 astra, and i'm experiencing mixed results. but much more positive results than opus, at least.

i should probably go to bed soon.