discombobulated

 today has been ridiculous. i got a (literal) couple of hours' sleep, then dragged myself out of bed to... i don't know what i did... then rushed out to catch a bus to my mom's bank to sort something out with her account.

there was no queue, but no workers either, so the manager called me into his office. when i asked him what he would do, his advice was that it would of better value to us to go home and take care of it ourselves.

the bus driver on the way home / to my office took a wrong turn that sent us in a wide circle around the hospital, in traffic, which was ridiculous. gd handed me a small lunch at the door and i headed to my client, arriving just in time for my team daily.

the day was, well, busy. lots of babysitting AI, literally flipping between contexts like it wasn't hurting my brain. i have spent most of the day consistently switching between four or five different things at a time and trying not to lose my mind.

i *am* the orchestrator. i need to level up and outsource that function to AI already.

towards the end of the day, i saw someone start preparing a PR to go in before the golang work that i've been spending weeks on, on a project nobody ever touches, and that i'd finally asked for a review for this morning thinking it was done. i actually panicked, and sent messages both to the author and his manager begging them to make sure my changes went in first.

i'm very grateful that they acquiesced 🙏

i also spent a lot of the day troubleshooting my auto-doc integration. and after walking home and shaving my beard in an attempt to decompress, i dived straight back into it and i'm still going now (on the other machine). so now i'm going to deliberately stop what i'm doing and go play a game with mr smear.

oh! my sister and i were just talking, it looks like she has the exact same lower back / hip flexor thing and she also didn't sleep last night :/

psychological wargames

 omfg. it's 3.40am and i've spent the past hour or so struggling to sleep - i'm tiiiired. at first it was mental restlessness, then it was lower back and hip flexors, i'm a complete mess.

...

it took me too long to get ready to leave this morning, so i had to remain home for my daily. then i headed to the office for a day largely defined by arguing with AI.

the good news: this three-month project that's been dragging out for the past couple of weeks? the current phase is done, i finally got my latest fixes in, tested everything, and it came out clean. this is huge!

the not-so-good news: i'm still working on the golang stuff, which is tiring, but it looks like i'm in the final stretch.

the other good news: i started working on the interruption ticket for our previous client team, and the most troubling chunk of work appears to have been done already.

i had lunch with the client team, which was fun, and then a long chat with sailor; mostly about protoplasm, but i also apologized for arguing when in reality we were both talking about two very different things - it was comforting that even after i explained where we diverged, it still required clarification, which meant it wasn't like i'd missed something obvious :P

i had to cut him short in order to get back to work, but to be fair we were both excited by a direction i'd given him for a therapeutic game...

in the evening, i left the office and warned mr smear we'd be going out rollerblading, which was met with a bad attitude. gd and i together managed to navigate it, i rotated my wheels while he got his on, and by the time we left the apartment he was in a good frame of mind.

he actually did rather well - he's exploring downhill control and becoming an ambi-turner - and it was a fun ride. on the way back we happened past two guys with pit bulls, and omg i miss my brother's twins. mr smear's introduction to one of them was it pushing itself up against him, i think he now has a better sense of what raw power feels like :P

we showered, talked to my mom, and had dinner. dinner was great, but i may have made a mistake dipping a marshmallow into the scorpion pepper sauce. i found the place where melts in your mouth meets melts your mouth, and aside from my tears i could tell you precisely where in my digestive tract the results were located for quite a while after.

i was tired, but i knew that i wouldn't sleep well if i went straight to bed, so i sat down to slowly but surely figure out how to get AI playing with unity. it took me about two and a half hours to get an agent using the unity mcp, and then half an hour to go from being impressed by the results, to being absolutely, literally amazed.

this is a game changer.

[pun not intended]

the stretch / eyeball melting

 sleep journal entry: i was so tired from the night before that i mostly slept well; when i got up in the middle of the night, it was very briefly and primarily due to a stuffed nose.

...

we're just about at the end of the month, and i just looked at my personal timesheets:

20 hours for my employer

50 hours for my auto-doc

105 hours for my client

...

 got up around 6am yesterday morning, and the first thing i encountered online absolutely stunned me (and, soon after, gd as well) and struck a devastating blow: protoplasm had posted a beautiful photo of him and his girlfriend a couple of days ago, but it wasn't at all clear that what prompted it was that last sunday, he woke up to discover that she had passed away in her sleep.

it's so completely and utterly wrong, and i cannot imagine the horror he's going through. we had quite a lengthy talk last night, he's holding up as well as can be expected and i'm grateful to know that he's got friends and family around him supporting him, but i feel bad being so far away and unable to be there in person.

...

from 6.45am until 6pm i was almost exclusively at my desk. the first couple of hours were putting the finishing touches on the auto-doc mvp and publishing my first article on the auto-doc, which was incredibly exciting but also tempered - as has been everything else - by the protoplasm news. the auto-doc is officially out there, and i'm praying it's picked up the way that i believe it should be and i'm fantasizing it will be.

the main thing i'm supposed to be working on for my client has been stuck in a holding pattern waiting on other people to click buttons, so my client work day became primarily about implementing my golang service post-incident recommendations which involved an inordinate amount of getting AI to not lie to me. in the afternoon i invested some time in writing up a one-pager and configuring the auto-doc for the client's infrastructure, which resulted in me stumbling across the SVP engineering's attempt to do the same work i'm doing (in the golang service), and politely messaging him to explain that i've already succeeded, and am simply in testing to prevent any further incidents.

thank god my software engineering efforts live and die by git graph being my primary interface to any codebase, if he'd "fixed" something without my context i might've had quite a time of paying for the merge :/

[though, in retrospect, i *could* have just excised his changes and written them off as wasted effort, but i'm still glad i caught him in time]

nystire came over and we took a walk through the park with mr smear, who'd had a little more exercise yesterday than i had, and i'm still being amused by mr smear's reaction when nystire suggested that we could always sell his kidneys to buy a gaming machine 😂

he's offered to take us stargazing with him in a couple of weeks, and mr smear and i are very much looking forward to it!

my sister had arrived home shortly before we got back, and everyone else helped with getting dinner on the table while i quietly fell apart from exhaustion. i managed to pull myself back together for dinner, then excused myself after a long conversation about protoplasm and my sister's friends and other-side-of-the-family's dealings with illness and death and bad behaviors to shower and talk to protoplasm and then say goodnight to mr smear and go to bed myself.

...

i did kick off the async game jam thing yesterday, but i was so tired there was no way i was going online :P

i've given up on the mastodon experiment and deleted my accounts. not only were they not providing me any real value, but they've become cesspool echo chambers of the regressive left and i couldn't find any communities with shared values or active members.

unfocused

i put a lot of work into the auto-doc today, i think it's kind of ready. almost. i guess. i dunno.

but it's after 1am and i need to go to bed soon. i did pass out a couple of times earlier while we all watched the addams family on the couch (gd agreed with me that we can do this during the summer holidays), but that doesn't really count, and my back and hip flexors were doing their thing :(

we watched some adventure time today for the first time in ages, and played a couple of games of guess who?, and my sister and i took mr smear for quite a long walk through to the port for ice cream, so we got *some* exercise even if mr smear is now obsessing over his belly again...

sleep journal entry and post-hosting

i had severe lower back and hip flexor discomfort just before going to bed and had to stretch for quite a while.

i woke up at 6.40am this morning, read stranger in a strange land for a while, then went back to sleep for another hour and a half.

now my back's hurting because mr smear decided he needed some "roughhousing" and i wasn't stretched and ready to chase him around the apartment :P

...

gd posted the following yesterday, based on our experience hosting mr smear's friend the other day:

Many will hate me for this, but IDGAF anymore. I'm starting to wonder about children going through actual clinical burn outs being diagnosed as autistic. I have to ponder this, but after a certain experience I had recently (with a non autistic child in a toxic environment), certain behaviours can very much be mistaken for autism. Burns outs are very real and they don't only affect grown ups.

someone responded with "just because you're autistic doesn't mean you can't also be an asshole."

indeed - but also, just because you're an asshole doesn't mean you can't also be hurting and flailing about, it's a vicious cycle. in this case in particular, i don't care what this child was diagnosed with officially, i think the root cause is a severe lack of boundaries.

and as a parent who took a hell of a long time to learn how to establish boundaries in a healthy way (i'm still learning), i'm not unsympathetic to how hard that can be, especially in a time like now with an overload of awful parenting advice and far too much media and social media influence.

the resting restless

 am i okay? i did sleep easier after my previous post. i still got up pretty early, though. i started my day on the balcony, doing a bunch of random things* before getting to work on the auto-doc and its write-up.

* including resetting the theme of the sonnetcomix website, which has been bothering me for a while.

i managed to make a fair amount of progress before we left for the shuk. it felt like a long bus ride, we enjoyed a pleasant walk down the now completed king george street, we walked through nahalat binyamin, then back to the shuk, and i immediately split from gd and my sister gathering groceries and took mr smear for a (very expensive) fruit juice and to stand in a spot of shade away from the crowds.

today was hot.

we met up with the girls, took a short walk and said goodbye to my sister, then the three of us went to find a bus home.

apparently i was the only able-bodied person on the bus willing to stand up for a pregnant woman. it's kind of distressing.

aside from a very pleasant nap on the couch in the air-conditioning, and later going with my sister and mr smear for a last-minute shopping round, i've spent my afternoon and evening playing games (balatro and slay the spire 2), and watching youtube videos, and just generally quieting the noise in my brain as much as possible.

i've just scolded mr smear for having ignored his screen-time alarm (as usual) and sent him to shower, and i think i'm going to just continue to be "off".

hyper-real

 i slept remarkably well last night. i got up a little before my alarm this morning, and took to my office instead of the balcony so as not to disturb the kids sleeping in the living room. i began my day by writing up the article about what AI teaches us about human consciousness (leading to a new appreciation to the insights of the movie memento), and did some work on the auto-doc, then headed out with my sister to meet up with our cousins.

...

i'd managed to get the wrong address from google maps - i just checked, and the address in google maps is simply incorrect - and that led to some confusion as we first walked the right way, then turned back because the address was wrong, then doubled back once we arrived at the wrong place. so we arrived a bit late to the beachfront coffee shop. then ordering coffee turned into a thing (apparently the guy behind us was being weirdly stressed about me speaking to the cashier), and then we sat down at the table to discover that the chairs have all been bolted in place.

weird fucking place.

anyway, i spent most of the hour making my pitch, primarily to our younger cousin but it was a good conversation all round. i was very grateful that my sister was with me because she definitely contributed, and also grateful for our older cousin pointing out that our younger cousin has been looking for something meaningful, and by the time i had to run i believe i'd managed to put all the pieces together into something coherent.

i walked out of there buzzing after having been thanked warmly and told he was already thinking about it.

...

my phone went off informing me that i had a newly scheduled meeting that my manager had arranged with one of the data guys (they'd been ignoring my request for assistance for a day or two), and i rushed through the shuk, getting properly turned around, in the search for a quiet place to get online, all the while discussing the meeting and the idea with my mother on the phone.

with a couple of minutes to go, i sat down on a bench under a tree, sweating in the already-heavy heat, actively context-switching into the meeting and nervously praying that i or my computer didn't get shat on by birds. that was when i realized that it wasn't an online meeting, there was no link, and i had been expected to be physically in the office.

that was also when i saw that i'd just been contacted about the work i'd been doing the day before, and learned that by fixing the nine year-old bugs in the golang service, i'd inadvertently caused an incident 🤦‍♂️

fortunately, reverting was easy (because i'd fixed its CI a week or two ago) and i quickly made my way to the bus. on the way home, i continued to apologize and explain and reassure the poor on-call that the incident was over and that i would provide the post-mortem.

i was hungry by the time i got off the bus, and stopped at home to pick up a sandwich from gd and then walk it to the office. it was more than just a sandwich. it was a heavy, delicious sushi filling on good bread, and by the time i was done i felt a combination of deep satisfaction and a sense of having eaten more than i needed.

i arrived at the office just in time to see the guy i was meeting with leave for lunch. and, also, just in time for my elevator pitch to my employer.

...

the call was fifteen minutes long (it had been scheduled for half an hour), and he got the idea pretty quickly. he asked a couple of good questions, and then told me he wanted a PRD. so 🤘

then he informed me that he'd considered my request for a raise, and that these weren't good times for it but he does appreciate my situation, and offered me a very respectable bonus instead... on condition that i don't leave the company within a year.

i was very grateful, both for the bonus and for the implicit additional positive feedback.

...

writing an AI-assisted post-mortem is a treat. it put all the facts together, i edited and added a recommendation, and it was started and published within 25 minutes and without any stress.

my recommendation: protect the bad / broken client-facing behavior, but disconnect it from actually trying to do anything.

i was asked for help by one of my previous client team, and i hope i've managed to onboard him as a new (replacement) dashboard-as-code champion.

i bumped into the other contractor, and we talked about our employer's new market shift, and invited him to join my "async game jam" experiment.

i tried to discuss the incident with someone from the old client team, and ended up down a rabbit hole with another AI specialist and demo'ed the auto-doc. now both he and my manager want to see the one-pager, and he gave me some pointers as to what specifically he wants to see, which is encouraging!

i finally sat down with the data engineer, and discovered that the problem i've been needing help with was a bit simpler than i'd thought. we both spent some time working on the fix in parallel, hopefully it'll be in early next week.

i then had a one-on-one with my manager, which turned into a very long, very interesting debate because we have very different ideas about what to focus on when building out our harness. there are some things we clearly agree on, though, and i was pleased at the end when i made a suggestion that he was happy with, and even more pleased to speak to the AI specialist again and discover that he'd already implemented something similar that i can use to make it happen :)

the happy hour was good, and i continued my earlier conversation with my fellow consultant before my client / the boss pulled me in to a meeting with the previous client team's lead - he wants me to do another job for them next week, between other jobs :P

i worked another hour, then left the office feeling pretty darned good about how my day went.

...

gd, on the other hand, had not had such an easy day. she was traumatized by mr smear's friend from the wrong side of the tracks, and having to parent him in ways that one would hope a ten or eleven year-old wouldn't need. ultimately it sounds like she handled the whole thing excellently, but it was difficult and concerning. i discussed it with mr smear as we strapped on our rollerblades - he'd been supporting gd in trying to help his friend, and for the most part had behaved very well himself - and he seems to be a lot more appreciative of the parenting he's gotten having witnessed the alternative...

...

the rollerblading went well, though it got off to a frustratingly slow start, and we had a good time and it was a beautiful (if hot and humid) evening. it took mr smear so insanely long to get showered and ready for dinner, though, that by the time we sat down my sister had already returned home from ra'anana after having had dinner herself, but she sat with us to chat.

it was pretty late by the time we were done, and i didn't last long after putting mr smear to bed. i suspected i wouldn't sleep through the night, though, and i think i lay awake for at least an hour before getting up almost an hour and a half ago.

perhaps i'll sleep easier having gotten all of this down.

on the edge

 today was just... unbelievable.

i almost made progress with my auto-doc, but had to leave halfway to make it to the office on time for my team daily that i didn't know had been postponed.

aside from reviewing a teammate's code (which happened to provide some very helpful hints for my auto-doc integration), i spent all of my client hours working on the golang service that i'd said i was done with, but kept diving down the rabbit hole and discovering weirder and weirder things.

before noon i travelled to my employer's office to meet with the gameis guy. i couldn't find him, but i had a sync with my mentor anyway. then i looked for him again, bumping into my sales team rep and getting some "insider information" regarding which way the wind is blowing - anyone who isn't "with the program" as far as AI is concerned is going to have a very tough time finding employment or staying employed. i still couldn't find him, and ended up being drawn in to a "tech circle" (which was interesting), after which i finally found him but only had 25 minutes of his time before he had to go off to something.

so i sat down with him and his friend, and learned that they're both working at our employer as a day job, but run a gaming company as a night job as well. they gave me all sorts of advice, and insights, in addition to a brief summary of their crazy journey so far.

immediately after that i sat down with a guy i'd met at the hackathon, and i spent the next twenty minutes or so flooding him with info and advice (mostly about working with AI) and getting him onboard with my "async" game jam idea.

then i spoke to my group lead, and introduced her to my auto-doc, and she was super excited when she saw the demo ^_^

the rest of the work day - in the office, and at home - was all about refining my golang service effort and incrementally solving each wave of issues. it's been a trip, and a very expensive one: i'm pretty confident that claude's opus model has suddenly becoming considerably dumber and way more expensive :/

i got home to find gd in a state of shock, she has no idea how to deal with a little boy whose family isn't particularly into hygiene (or boundaries). i took the kids for a walk to pick up snacks, regaling them with AI horror stories; apparently, i was effective enough that mr smear's friend stopped me to delete chatgpt from his phone.

we were musing over whether mixing the salt & pepper chips with the balsamic vinegar & caramelized onion flavors of country chips would approach a salt & vinegar experience, and i decided it was worth a try: the kids were horrified, but i bought them anyway and after our sushi dinner (which we all ate too much of) we gave it a try, and while it wasn't what we were hoping for it was still a case of the whole being better than the sum of its parts.

i managed to get the two of them showered between getting home and eating dinner, which was quite a story.

my sister came home pretty late, after we'd begun trying to get the kids to bed (they're camping out in the living room), and while they amused themselves with non-screen activities (much to their chagrin) the three of us sat in our office and retold some pretty hairy parts of our life stories. and then it was midnight, and the kids had been asleep for a while without us realizing, and now it's time to call it a night and get ready for an important morning.

getting stuff done

 it's been a busy morning! we failed to get gd's canadian crypto account reactivated (their verification is broken), but i managed to get my israeli one sorted out. this was after discovering yesterday that ethereum gas fees have finally normalized after all the upgrades, making it worthwhile transferring money, and that compound has been generating far less interest than promised.

i mean, with our amounts of money it didn't make a huge difference, but still.

while doing that, i managed to get the blast window for our shelter roped up so that gd can close it herself in case of emergency. gd and mr smear cleaned the house yesterday, specifically worried about all of us (including my sister and potentially mr smear's friend) having to sleep in our shelter bedroom together. apparently things are heating up, though i've been completely disconnected from the news cycle these days.

then i called and made an appointment for her to see the dentist, because of course she's in pain after her root canal and crown were done... at least her stomach seems to be doing a bit better today.

i think i've sent my insurance broker the documents she wanted - turns out my previous employer forgot to update the insurance companies that i wasn't working for them any more 🤔

finally, gd found our boxing gear (whew!) and i posted the mongoose's guitar hero guitars on the facebook marketplace.

so, all in all, it's been a morning.

[chokes on a raisin bran raisin]

sleep journal entry

i got some work done on my auto-doc last night, but then mr smear asked me to read to him and i ended up putting myself to sleep.

ironically, he was apparently up a while later, sitting on the couch and asking my sister if she could apply a general anaesthetic because he couldn't sleep 🤭

i had a rough night. general mental disquiet, and plenty of lower back discomfort which needed heavy stretching. during a longer stretching session, i could hear what sounded like a post-zapper fly dying, but i wasn't able to find it.

gods, i'm tired. i mean, i'm up, but i'm tired.