low drama

 apparently mr smear's friend left us a gift... gd's currently cutting his hair in the bathtub because he's got an active lice infestation that a treatment earlier had no effect on. mr smear's been growing his hair for a long time and it just grew out long enough to be really cool.

but the treatments are seriously expensive, and we can't house lice, so...

i need a fucking break. gd, too, judging by the cursing that's been going on.

...

getting to work means walking across the bridge, and in this heat that's become a thing. i spent $0 of AI tokens at work today, but that's because i wasn't able to log in for most of the day and i ended up using my personal account for the little bit of work i did. and then, when i finally asked for a code review, one of the guys asked a question that made me realize that i probably didn't need to do this work after all 🤦‍♂️

i did learn how to do the backfill cost exercise, though.

my 1-on-1 with my manager was pleasant, but they're being really weird about not announcing to the teams that i'm leaving, even though i understand that quite a few people already know. it makes it especially awkward for dx, whose lead has quit and is leaving on thursday and now i'm on my way out as well...

...

the highlight of our day was dinner, and introducing mr smear to the wonder years. not only is it a wonderful series, but it's aged so well and it's so perfectly age-appropriate for an 11 year old!

alright, i'm fasting for tomorrow morning's bloodwork, it's late, i've slayed some spire while the drama's* been going on in the other rooms and now i'm going to bed.

at least we gave the guitar hero guitars away.

* oh, yes. and there's more plumbing drama too. the landlord doesn't want to spend any money and gd found a different leak in another bathroom 🙄

live demonstration

 it wasn't a presentation, it was a live demonstration. i spent the rest of my morning running through all the steps and trying to make sure it would go smoothly.

i was feeling a bit faint again, but also nervous, and particularly nervous about eating anything that might cause me any kind of gastric distress. so in the office, i avoided any snacks, even nuts, except for two pieces of fruit, and of those two pieces the banana tasted suspicious.

it was a weird few hours in the client's offices, i just found out one of the guys i'm sitting with is leaving at the end of the week and everyone thought i already knew. mixing-and-matching AI agents is awkward, dealing with surprise bad data is frustrating, and nobody knows how anything affects token usage.

then i shifted to my employer's office. on the light rail, an apparent dance troupe boarded our car to film a jubilant celebration, which felt a bit forced and incongruous with my reverie but i appreciated it nonetheless.

it was a huge relief to learn that my demo wasn't the only thing we were doing yesterday. also, that i'd arrived half an hour early and i needed about twenty minutes and help from an IT guy to get my laptop hooked up to the audio visual system.

that gave me ten minutes to have an exciting chat with one of the game jam (potential) participants.

then we stopped for hamburgers. i got five small, pretty good vegan burgers, which meant a few to take home to my son and his new friend :P

the live demo went pretty well, but there was a loooooong time waiting for an AI initialization that was quite awkward. overall, i got some great feedback and engagement, though, which was very encouraging!

on my way out, i spoke to one of our group leads who informed me that a company has already shown interest in me for my next contract. on the one hand, that's a big relief. on the other, it's working with a tech stack i really don't care for... the same one i'm working on currently :P

i came home, dropped off my back and the burgers, then caught a bus to herzeliya, refreshing disturbed's the sickness album in preparation for meeting david draiman (fanboy gush).

the evening was really interesting and satisfying. i had a bunch of conversations, with a bunch of inspirations, and made some good connections. at the very end i got to exchange a few words with david himself - i was awkward, but he was cool - and then it was time to return home.

the last bus arrived ten minutes late and was marked as being out of service, but at least it got me home at a reasonable hour (and reasonable expense). i gobbled down leftovers, showered, and managed to put my back out leaning over to pick up the laundry.

then i slept. i slept pretty well, but i woke up with sciatica firing on all cylinders and even with help from gd and a lot of stretching, i'm still not in good shape...

regardless, i started the day reading more of my favorite thing is monsters, and now that i'm reading anka's story it's clearly not appropriate for mr smear at all. possibly not for gd, either. i was so thoroughly engrossed and traumatized that i didn't realize where i was nor what time it was, so now that i've quickly eaten breakfast and written this down, i'm running late for work...

game/sleep journal entry

 i slept surprisingly well last night, having gone to bed around midnight (after slaying some of the spire) and waking up a little before 6am. then i sat outside, enjoying my coffee and completely oblivious to the world around me while being sucked into the drama of my favorite thing is monsters. i feel like it's inappropriate for mr smear for a number of reasons, but also not, and the artwork is incredible.

now it's time to work on my presentation, so i decided to screen record my game menu so far and post it to the very quiet async game jam group. i'm very proud of how this is going.

 

the leak

 i found it! i hope? i can hear the dripping from the guest toilet cistern, which has a tap that can't be closed because it's too old and the washer is worn. tomorrow's a really busy day for me, i still haven't done anything about putting a presentation together (although i've spent the past hour or two putting all the last week's changes through their paces), and now it looks like it's going to include a plumber as well.

perhaps this is the reason our water bill's always so high? who knows?!

otherwise, gd's in bed already but mr smear's up drawing [he just interrupted me, i don't know why but he came looking for a hug], and i'm starting to feel like i need to be winding down...

[interrupted by a call from the plumber, followed by a chat with mr smear explaining to him that if he wants to make real money then being a plumber or electrician is the way to go]

*sigh*

token cheat

 i slept alright last night, though i got up for bit and then tried to sleep in after, and was woken at 7.17am by an enthusiastic city worker to be informed that they'd cleared the dead rat from the sidewalk that i reported yesterday.

they honestly didn't need to call :/

my first hour or two were spent putting together a summary of my last six months for my recruiter, while simultaneously continuing the auto-doc work i'd begun yesterday afternoon (an endless back-and-forth gen-eval loop between opencode's bigpickle and codex luna) which literally took the entire day to complete.

[takes a moment to do that just-one-more-thing]

to be honest, i have only the vaguest notion of what was being done all day. there were a couple of points where i had to get involved and clarify some principles, but by and large it was a lot of uninteresting crap and a lot of breaking one thing while fixing another...

budget AI is, well, budget.

once i got the summary sent off, i took mr smear with me to the pharmacy to pick up gd's prescription. he read while keeping an eye on the queue numbers, i did a bit of shopping, completely forgetting the mug mission we'd been on on friday, until we were already home :P

we must have been there an hour or so, and i was feeling worryingly faint. not sure if sick, or just sleep deprived. i just had to look up the term sleep deprived.

once we returned home, i finally started looking at client work. i spent a few hours trying to establish a baseline cost estimate for the backfill i'm supposed to be starting this week, which took forever and ended with me encountering bad source data and having to make my jobs more tolerant. i feel like i cheated, because i used the databricks AI for the real work and my own tokens just to validate it.

the inexplicable cost jump from last week reared its ugly head, and led me to dive deep to try and figure out what was going on... which led me to the not-exactly-verifiable conclusion that mlflow tracing was the prime culprit. removing its artifacts seemed to make my later verification efforts vastly cheaper, but in any event i'm no longer even trying to use the company AI to get any actual work done.

during one of mr smear's downtimes, i set him to cleaning our standing fans. i had to guide him a bit at first, but the second one he did all by himself and he really did do a good job 🙌

another win was getting him to use another of his downtimes to practice drawing backgrounds, and he appears to be quite excited by the results, though i cannot verify what he's been up to because he's being unusually secretive.

yet another win was getting him to come with me for a walk once i was *done* with my work day, he was happy to join me and we had a good time discussing all sorts of interesting things ^_^

[exhales]

dinner time.

it's not supposed to be work

 last night was great! dinner was delicious (and quick), although once again the challah-peño was too hot for poor mr smear... mr smear and i sampled the individual mochi (the vanilla one was good, but neither was worth the expense compared to regular ice cream), gd packed up the gift mochi and i headed out to hail a taxi. over the past couple of years tahoma's husband has been using their bomb shelter time to develop a whole lot of cocktails, and over the course of the evening i had two of them, and the two of them were sufficient to do a real number on me.

otherwise, it was a lovely couple of hours spent with them and nystire and a guy i haven't seen since a pride march around 2008 / 2009 :)

aside from a half an hour or so of lower back pain waking me up in the middle, i slept pretty soundly.

i woke up pretty early, considering, and i spent most of the morning and early afternoon feeling pretty tired. i read a bit of my favorite thing is monsters, which is phenomenal, and cleaned the balcony, and eventually managed to get myself motivated enough to spend a few hours investigating alternative AI harness and model options, while simultaneously testing them on my auto-doc project and the tarot game.

i'm still going, though i've had some success it overall feels tragically like real work, stressful, frustrating and not at all fun. heavy limitations on AI usage take something that's painful enough as it is - working with an idiot that needs a lot of babysitting to not fuck up your shit - and making it essentially impossible. in addition to that, i'm no longer in the least bit interested in doing the coding work manually like a peasant, and none of the tools (specifically codex and opencode, i've given up on pi for now) have any of the plugins, workflows or options that i need to operate effectively.

everything is broken.

i took a break to play uno with gd, which was great fun for us but left a bitter taste after mr smear had not only refused, but ended up being rude enough to lose rather a lot of screen time :/

after that, we went out on our rollerblades. he complained for a while about his ankle hurting, but i think i sorted it out by tightening the straps... also, by incentivizing him with a drink, because we went back up and through the park on the way home and he was doing fine.

along the way we encountered the horrible homeless woman, who's very aggressive and started walking towards us while calling us names. i discussed how we were handling it with mr smear, avoiding her and trying not to provoke her, but in retrospect i think i should have called the police - i think it was a week ago that she was doing the same to gd, and i'm quite over the stress of whether or not i'm going to have to get physical with this unpredictable maniac in order to protect my family.

mr smear and i both had cold* showers, and i got stuck in to an hour of troubleshooting a ridiculous unity license issue (the AI broke it trying to run tests in sandbox mode, and it took a lot of experimentation and grilling gemini to give me a useful answer), then i stopped for dinner.

* cold-ish, in this weather the coldest water is more cool than cold

dinner was great, after which we had another discussion about gaming, and why we need to compromise, and gd - in a show of great magnanimity - chose to play fluxx in spite of the fact that she doesn't like it.

well.

mr smear, oblivious to gd's rising anger, enjoyed himself in spite of his protests, and did really well. gd, on the other hand... i've told her it's up to her to find a game that she wants to play.

after wishing mr smear a good night, i jumped back into to the game dev, with a little auto-doc on the side, and i've managed to catch the menu system vibe i wanted, which is pretty exciting.

and i've only used ten percent of my weekly limit...

i think i'm about ready for bed, now. tomorrow's gonna be an interesting week 🤷‍♂️

boding

 omg i'm soooo tired, and as soon as i've eaten i'm heading out to tahoma's to celebrate his birthday. maybe i should caffeine up. [caffeines up. oh, great, organic soya drink full of cream-colored bits]

after i posted yesterday, we had dinner. mr smear ate so much - we split our meals, his "egg" salad sandwich was enormous, and i think we both agreed that my "shuwarma" was too delicious to pass up - that he didn't have space for dessert.

then the two of us played a whole lot of among us together, working together sometimes, and me backstabbing him a bunch of others, but in all cases we both were having fun and laughing at the ridiculous situations we found ourselves in / made for ourselves.

after he went to bed, i played out acts 3 and the ending of inscryption. mr smear occasionally poked his head around the door because he was having trouble sleeping, and that went on until very late, and then i ended up going to bed around midnight.

i had a couple of wakings during the night, but nothing major 🤷‍♂️

i don't recall too many specifics from this morning, but it did involve checking our finances and moving mr smear's pocket money around. if we can keep it together, we might actually be okay this month. *if* 🤞

i managed to leave at a reasonable time to go pick up our cleaning materials, which turned out to be considerably heavier than i'd anticipated. i lugged them to the sarona market, with a plan to pick up speciality halva as a gift, but the halva store was closed (hey, if you don't want to make money, don't open your store during your official hours) and i ended up picking up a few things at the asian market. the girl on duty was very sweet, and managed to find me a sealable bag with some ice in it to transport the frozen goods home.

i bussed home, had breakfast, then coffee, then a very serious nap, eventually taking mr smear out on a mission to find mugs and wine. we didn't find mugs, but we did get a lot of steps in.

it was pretty hot today.

i had a third coffee when we got home, mr smear got some screen time, and then we had a big fight because he wasn't ready to help me clean the floors. we got through it, but not without unpleasantness.

at least the floors are clean, i guess.

then it was shower time for both of us, and i tried to get some more work done with the auto-doc, but i'm just become more and more demoralized about AI output quality and costs and at the same time i don't - i mean i really, really don't - want to do any of the work manually :/

so that's the vibe that's been haunting me this whole week, and i made a conscious decision in the shower to turn it off, at least for the rest of the day. so i've read some more of inside moebius part 1, which includes some pretty disturbing sequences (in addition to being quite an inspiration in general), and tried to nap (didn't happen, even though i'm falling apart), and i guess...

... i guess i just need to chill. i'm looking forward to tonight, but i'm a bit sad about the fact that i need  a fourth coffee to even get out the door. come to think of it, i needed a fourth cup yesterday as well...

a belated hogwart's letter

 it's mr smear's 11th birthday today! he got a hand-drawn pseudo-hogwart's letter, but considering the fact that he's already been at the real-life equivalent of hogwart's for the past year it's a bit late :P

he spent a good chunk of his day watching harry potter, when he wasn't just chilling. sounds like a pretty good birthday plan to me 🤷‍♂️

...

i just got home deeply frustrated, and i'm feeling burned out for the second day in a row. i've invested an enormous amount of effort in keeping my AI token usage down, and in figuring out how to use mlflow to gain insight into where my token spend is going, but i've hit my daily budget two days in a row and i've already burned through more than half of my monthly limit.

and i have very little to show for it, because anthropic's AI be dumb as fuck. i was complaining to one of the AI guys next to me earlier, and the guy sitting behind me turned out to be the head of the program (just visiting our side of the office for the day) and he jumped in to clarify that i must be doing something wrong. he explained "progressive disclosure" to me (i'm very familiar, just not with the term) and sent me a link to some good tips on writing CLAUDE.md, and recommended claude-mem, which seemed like a good idea, but in retrospect i think that's the reason that i blew through half my daily budget in the last session before i left the office thoroughly deflated and demoralized.

i can't be certain, though, because my teammate asked me to redirect my mlflow traces to a central location, and there they don't provide enough context for me to figure out what the actual calls entailed.

i'm so over AAALLLLLLLLL of this bullshit. it's just ridiculous.

...

tuesday night:

we started watching life of brian - after giving up on a bunch of other movies that plex wasn't playing nicely with - and i had to cut the evening short and climb into bed because i was done.

yesterday:

i've started the past two days reading inside moebius part 1, which is sheer brilliance. having said that, i only barely started it yesterday because i was so inspired to dive into the game design for the tarot-based game i started working on last week. i have some really exciting ideas.

unfortunately, trying to share those ideas with my wife that early in the morning led to a bit of a fight; although it resolved with us both learning something important, it did burn my "roadmap" time and started the day with a shitty vibe. then the work day dragged me down into the dumps, ending with an awful sequence of me losing my mind (and my token budget) trying to understand why all my metrics were disappearing (and subsequently learning that metrics must be whitelisted manually in order to be preserved, but not for all the repos i've been working on), and then being called into a meeting with my client team's lead and making a total ass of myself both because she was asking questions about how the service operated, which is a nightmare to explain and which both of us had very different understandings of, and because i was struggling to untangle a whole lot of related stuff in my head, when all she really wanted to know was "is this possible?", a question which had a very simple answer.

so that was the note i left the office on yesterday. i felt broken, and like my brain was melting out my ears.

...

i met mr smear at the bus stop, and we hopped on a bus to dizengoff in the hopes we'd be able to return the motion controllers we'd bought for his birthday. in addition to having a fun time together, i was extremely relieved (and impressed!) to discover that the guys running the second hand game shop are really decent, and kind, and they did what they could to figure out how we could make the controllers work before pleasantly accepting them and returning the money.

i'll definitely be happy to do business with them again.

we picked up some stuff at the supermarket (including a treat of malt beer for mr smear), had an awkward moment leaving because - for a second time - the self-checkout hadn't sent me my receipt and the security guard wouldn't let us out, and then we returned home for dinner.

after dinner, we finished watching life of brian. i was constantly worried that mr smear would bail, and he did want to at one point, but by the time it was over he informed me that in his opinion it's a solid 8/10 🤘

today:

i got up early, read, and spent just more than an hour on my auto-doc project before heading to the office, very much not wanting to go. as described, the work day sucked. in addition to everything else, during the afternoon i developed painful bloating, and that combined with my work stress to make me really unhappy and very, very keen to get the hell out of there.

gd's not feeling too well either, so for mr smear's birthday dinner we're ordering instead of going out. 

...

good grief.

so hot outside

 i'm so, so tired. i went to bed around 1am (inscryption), and actually slept, but woke up surprisingly early. i read stuff on the balcony as the world woke up - being grateful for the birdsong, and disappointed that my eyesight is so blurry - and one of the things i read has been sitting with me all day:

the unicontext

...

our first daily was awkwardly cut off, most of the day was spent burning tokens on improving observability that led to a complete refactor. the client handled that way more positively than i did :P

also, i learned that the big project that was on hold just got resumed, so i know what i'm going to be doing next week.

everything around those two was AI tracing, and a very uncomfortable and stressful second part of the daily which involved biting my lip because my manager was saying stuff that was so unbelievably wrong... i think i found the right approach to address it and figure out what happened, but i'm not convinced.

...

i had a telephonic doctor's appointment this afternoon, and she's asked me to try a medication with a sedative side-effect, in addition to doing the full bloodwork and visiting a clinic at the hospital that i've never heard of, but am almost sure is the same one i just went to :P

...

the end of the day was more than half an hour of me trying desperately to get out of the office, but trapped by my personal codex agent visibly doing what i asked it to do and being terrified of disconnecting it and then not being able to resume it later.

i met mr smear on the way to the bus to the comics library, where we returned the copy of chainsaw man he'd borrowed and left with an armful of amazing works: two of my favorite asterix comics (the normans and the britons), an amulet book, inside moebius part 1 and my favorite thing is monsters. we got home to a delicious daal dinner, watched the simpsons episode on the prohibition, then went through some of my youtube playlist for mr smear, then showered and brushed teeth, and are now about to sit down and watch something in spite of the fact that i barely managed to keep my eyes open while dragging myself to the shower.

i'm not going rollerblading tonight.