the news, continued

my response to a friend wondering if the global caliphate might not somehow be a possible stepping stone to a utopian future:

islamic rule is not a "it gets worse before it gets better" kind of thing, if you look at the death and destruction and erasure of history in the countries around israel, and in north africa, and in the rewriting of history that's taking place in the west, the only way forward for humanity is to either stop the advance of the anti-west bloc (islam + communism) or escape the planet entirely.

i don't believe any of the sci-fi visions of a united future are realistic, or plausible, or possible - every vision of utopia is by definition dystopia, because you can't have a perfectly cooperative and non-violent society without killing a few million people. humans just aren't like that. we thrive on competition, on drama, and on conflict. we need identities, morals and principles to defend, and we need armies and borders to defend them with.

if the west does lose to the red/green alliance, every single one of us who dreams of a better future is either going to be murdered or driven underground, pretending to cooperate while trying to hold on to fragments of knowledge and art and living in constant fear of discovery.

that's not the sci-fi dystopia *i* want. i'll take cyberpunk corporate rule over that any day.

be careful what you wish for

good morning! just reporting that it was a god-awful experience. not only was i wired up extremely uncomfortably and very restricted in movement, that has got to be the lumpiest, most unpleasant mattress i've ever tried to sleep on. army and camping mattresses are luxury compared to that torture device. 

i was worried that they'd send me home after learning that i'd eaten two rows of dark chocolate after dinner, forgetting that that's the equivalent of a cup of tea / a third of a cup of instant coffee (about 25mg). but caffeine before bedtime was not the problem.

i spent all night unsuccessfully trying to find a position that wasn't actively hurting me, both my neck and my lower back. occasionally i'd turn in a way that made me sure i'd ripped out a cable or something. the things up my nose made it impossible to sneeze or blow my nose, and the air-con made sure i was dried out by morning even though i *needed* it because i was wearing the deep-winter jammies gd made for me.

there was no reading. no playing sudoku until my eyes drooped. i know that i did actually fall asleep once or twice, but for the most part it was just a waking nightmare right before another stressful day at work (i'm trying to finish up the PR from yesterday on my work computer and i'm still having trouble) followed by a wedding.

good grief.

unfocus

 today has been *really* long, and i'm still battling with the PR cycle at work 🙄

only mr smear is playing hungarian dance in a funny keyboard mode so the mood is lighter than it could be.

some really big stuff happened today, all while i haven't been able to consume caffeine since 11am. first, the guy i worked with at my previous client reached out to let me know he's been sacked. so that was a shock. then i was invited to a company status meeting, where we were informed that he wasn't alone - we're essentially pivoting (we've talked about some of the changes for months), and everyone who hasn't been moving in the desired direction has been let go.

so that's been a shocker, and i'm still processing and feeling horrible for the people who were let go, and massively relieved for myself. this is scary stuff :(

later, my day was interrupted by an hour long "panel" of experts discussing general approaches towards our new roles as AI whisperers slash architects slash product managers. they had lots of valuable stuff to say, but why did it have to be now? (i'm just being tetchy, our group meetings are usually on monday afternoons)

but there was some more potentially good news today (in addition to the sleep lab booking) - i received a message from the tax return people: if they're not mistaken, then i'm due a heck of a lot more money than i expected. a lot more than the bonus my employer awarded me (which got taxed to shreds). even with their 15% (+tax) fee, that gives us a significant runway for me to get my side-project and salary shit together.

so that's BIG 🤞🙏

[stopped writing to respond to team lead, realizing that i didn't respond to his message yesterday and forgot to do what he asked - now scrambling to get it done before dinner :/]

so i'm doing a bit of juggling right now, full of anxiety, partially for completing my workday in at least a neutral way and partly because i'm nervous about finally going to a sleep lab and them finding nothing wrong... for once i hope i sleep poorly "as usual", because the past couple of weeks i've been mysteriously okay.

[the team lead's request took me a literal couple of minutes and uncovered something very wrong, i really dropped the ball on this one]

the news

 i just got bumped up for a sleep lab - TONIGHT! as opposed to february. this is exciting!

things on my mind i need to dump before i can start my day:

1. the death of france is a playbook that i guarantee is currently playing out in the UK, the US, and australia. it's not just that the trojan horse has been welcomed into the city, it's that the city was neglecting its own people and turning them away in the first place.

2. squishy toys are dangerous.

there was other nonsense in the news, but i don't have energy for any of it. and this morning i learned that mr smear is becoming addicted to ASMR videos by sitting next to kids watching them before school starts...

blank yawn

i'm feeling pretty dysfunctional after a pretty long day. i got nothing of value done this evening - save for translating a video about why the squishy trend is a shit one - after a day that wasn't particularly tough, but felt remarkably long nonetheless.

i vaguely remember this morning being an admin morning. the two highlights of my work day (ignoring the request from my team lead that i only saw when on my way home this evening) were a meeting with the devex guy, and my sub-team; the first went pretty well, i think, and i managed to convey the issue i uncovered as an afterthought, and the second saw me convince my sub-team to try an experiment of using a shared "memory" repo to keep track of open questions and decisions.

that latter meeting was awkward, because they hadn't prepared and neither had i, and the entire purpose of it was to discuss the AI's findings which i hadn't been able to make heads or tails of. but all's well that ends well 🤷‍♂️

i went to the office in my winter shoes, which are great if it's wet, but the promised rain didn't fall so my feet were uncomfortable all day for nothing. at least mr smear didn't get wet, he left this morning in sneakers and without an umbrella because we'd all forgotten to look at the weather app :P

apparently his tanach test didn't go so well, because we studied in english and he didn't pay attention in class in hebrew. we're going to have to fix that somehow.

my evening class was alright, i guess, but i got stuck on setup and found myself far behind the class on the exercise. i eventually caught up - mostly - but i'm not sure how much i gained from the experience.

i did come up with a couple of interesting game ideas on the way home, though.

having snacked rather a lot, i sampled gd's not-sushi rolls, biting my tongue to her amusement, and then biting my lip while complaining about her laughing at me biting my tongue :/

mr smear's keyboard-playing before bed was impressive. i love that he's into classical music and "making it his own".

jump

 well, mr smear eventually got through the homework, though it took him almost until dinner time. big data joined us for gin & tonics, then dinner, and aside from a moment where i unwittingly embarrassed gd it was a pretty relaxed evening. otherwise, i spent most of my time before and after working on my payments setup and a couple of minor games.

i slept pretty well last night.

today was predominantly about preparing mr smear for his tanach exam tomorrow (the book of joshua, which got him interested in the tanach in general) and the class meetup at sky jump for a corrective experience, which was great for him and in which i had some positive encounters with other parents (including, bizarrely, the crazy mom who i initially suspected had forgotten who i was 🤪). we'd walked there, but on the way home we could hear the thunderstorm approaching and rushed to catch the sababus (mr smear asked if that doesn't imply the existence of a savtabus) and when the skies opened over us and the rain came bucketing down, we were closed to a building entrance a couple of minutes away to take shelter until it calmed down enough for us to skedaddle home.

the most important part of the day was just before dinner, though. things had been going really well all day, but then they went quickly south (over screen time, of course) and they got worse before they got better. some interesting things came out of that, though, which we're hoping was a breakthrough and won't soon be forgotten.

a lot of the time i feel like have deep, meaningful conversations with mr smear is like chatting with an AI, clearing the context, and then starting fresh...

the rest of the evening was smooth, and now... it's already pretty late, i think i should probably hit the hay soon.

positive hair story

 i love the fact that i can play sudoku on my mobile until i pass out, without ads, no payment required (it's donation-based) ^_^

mr smear woke me up this morning, pretty gently, and he was cautious enough that i only just realized while typing this that he needed me awake to authorize him doing some "constructive screen time" making minecraft skins 😂

i woke up to the sound of ambulance sirens (we live on a highway), which inspired this:

MOOL-TEE-PASS!

we didn't have the easiest morning with / send-off for mr smear, these are not easy times...

with a little coaxing and guilting, gd accompanied me to the barber shop to bear witness. which worked out really well, because not only did the barber do a legitimately good job, but she has much to say about his approach and his attitude. we don't often have positive news stories, but this is one of them ^_^

we walked down dizengoff to teva castle, on the way picking up a jerusalem bagel. in my defense, i was becoming hangry at the time, but in retrospect it was a lot more breakfast than i should have had. i even tried offering it to a homeless guy i saw scrabbling in the trash, but i appear to have startled him and he rushed off - i didn't mean to embarrass him :(

overall, we made a good morning of it. on the way home, we got off at the nature and grocery stores and picked up a more few more things, and arrived home at precisely the same time as mr smear.

he's spent most of the afternoon catching up on homework, while i've spent it working on my payments system, and dabbling with a previous attempt at a balatro type of game i started building in early april...

* apparently. i keep doing spot checks and i haven't really caught him out yet

the weather is weird but it does feel like winter is finally on its way. i've been listening to my properly-shuffled playlist all afternoon, and it's so freaking cool!

slowdown

we just discovered that mr smear has found a way to install games on his phone, even though we've blocked it. now we suspect that he's been approving things from our phones, so we have to figure out whether that's the case without letting on in case that's not how he's doing it, because we don't want to give him any ideas.

well, isn't that a thing 🙄

...

today was a weird day. work-wise, i basically wasted most of it (and a heck of a lot of tokens) on work that seemed like a safe, quick win but turned out to be against company policy. i think i learned some stuff? but it was a bad call.

i went to the sleep clinic and spoke the same doctor i did last time.

"i walked out of there an hour later feeling pretty confident that the doctor had performed a thorough investigation into every relevant aspect of my potential narcolepsy (and potential rls, and possible anemia) and i felt very well understood" - from the last time

this time, i felt like i was talking to an AI with a polluted context. he couldn't move his focus past the rls, he couldn't keep the timelines straight, and i even switched to english and made a huge effort to be so clear and accurate that he couldn't possibly not understand... i'm not sure he understands. he did, however, do what he should have done last time, which is recommend that i do an actual sleep lab.

so far, this story has already taken more than a year... and the closest appointment is in another half a year. but hey, sleep is important, so what's another half a year after it's already been about sixteen?

gd's pissed off because i told him about my cannabis experiment, and he told me "the jury's out" over whether cannabis actually helps people sleep 🤦‍♂️

i think i'd have done better with an actual LLM.

by the time i got back home and had breakfast it was 3pm already. i spent an hour with my buddy testing her contributions, then switched to a long overdue 1:1 with my team lead. we began with doing a little digging into where we met tahoma - not only did we serve in the same unit, at roughly the same time, but were both inducted in the same year, and from the sounds of it he and i were probably on a lot of the same buses on our weekends when i used to stay on the kibbutz!

after discussing my ridiculous discoveries during the week (yesterday in particular), he gave me very encouraging feedback, after which we discussed the less positive feedback. overall, i left the call with a good feeling and i hope it's as clear to him that we're aligned.

i had no time at all to say goodbye to my family before rushing out to catch a bus to my evening class, and i arrived a few minutes late but just in time to not miss anything. i drove our office manager crazy (remotely) because i couldn't find my "gift" from the company status meeting which i'd forgotten to pick up (a very nice picnic kit), and then i couldn't find any non-barista milk alternatives because it was a in a closed delivery bag in the fridge :P

on the way out, sfs and i picked up another member for the asynchronous game jam ^_^

i spoke to my mom on the way home, we talked about my sleep clinic experience and about her selling her apartment, and then i got home for dinner, syncing with mr smear, and a relatively smooth evening. it's almost 11pm and i'm actually pretty tired, i think i'm going to try going to bed soon.

rules vs skills

i don't know where to begin this post, so i'll start with the ridiculous: today i learned that the company harness that everyone's forced to use with claude includes a rule that actively interferes with writing tests. and their automated code reviewer is a real stickler for good tests. this essentially leads to everyone (already confirmed with my onboarding buddy and my fellow contractor) being forced to run an absurd number of review cycles for each change, which is extremely expensive both in time and tokens and patience.

i'm confident that i found the cause because - with my custom harness wrapping their harness - i was able to disable the conflicting rule and i've had three code reviews since where the test coverage wasn't an issue.

this is literally insane.

it's now half-past midnight as i write this, and i only just finished writing up an article after / while putting my "fix" through its paces, excitedly watching my agent actually being thorough with purpose ^_^

i'm still laughing at my fellow contractor - her team won the company AI hackathon a few months ago - being absolutely delighted to hear that she's not the only one who's been struggling with this nonsense, and it was super-cool that someone who has a lot of real experience on the AI frontier praising my system (both my skills library and my harness).

this was all really cool.

...

the day got off to a rocky start over a frying pan, which both gd and i navigated and eventually (pretty quickly) understood why it was such a big deal and how to proceed. from there the day went pretty well.

oh... no. wait. both gd and i had nightmares last night. hers was pretty intense (everyone missing hands), but also kinda cool. mine was deeply disturbing, morbidly pornographic (really gross people we know), and i'll be fucked if i know how that specific shade of darkness got into my head :/

anyway, aside from all that the day started off pretty well. i resumed the telephony project work and completed it, so now i can conference call with confidence that the calls end when i want them to. i also made a little more progress on my website payment integration.

i made it to noon without eating breakfast, which for a day spent working at home is quite an achievement.

at some point both the public transport authority and our landlord reached out to me, it looks like they've discussed the plans for soundproofing the road side of our apartment, and should be signing off on them tomorrow. that's a huge relief!

the work day went pretty well, i think. a lot of wasted time, but that resulted in the discovery and i still can't quite believe how big it is. i'm going to have a hell of a time explaining it to their devex guy on sunday, especially considering that he's the guy who introduced the rule in the first place 🙄

i took a break to make what we hope with be the last monthly withdrawal (now that gd's prescription has been increased), and mr smear's homework *seems* to be done so i took him along with me for the walk, along the way teaching him about skills and rules :P

(i mean, i did teach him about context the other day, so...)

dinner was a very interesting (and delicious) peanut butter and mushroom noodle thing (not pad thai, but kinda similar), and we had a long chat with my mom, and mr smear played our conversation out with a piece on the piano he's been practicing, and i read a bit more of the light fantastic to him at bedtime.

it's really late, i kinda can't believe i knocked out that article so quickly, and i also was caught by surprise when it auto-published to my employer's publication when i'm not *quite* certain that they'll be happy with me telling a client horror story that hasn't been fully resolved yet... 🤷‍♂️

right, i'm tired, my wrist is hurting, i believe it's bedtime.

brain pain train

 it's been two days of mr smear fucking with everyone and making things shit. this is really, really hard.

i swear to god everything is testing me and my patience today. it's an everything is broken kind of day.

yesterday:

our family meeting yesterday took a long time, and had some rough moments. then i left to meet up with firefighter, it was pretty early but already dark.

firefighter and i had a great catch-up, with a lot of surprising things coming out and connecting with our often-overlapping philosophies. kind of similar to my earlier meeting with arnavot. life is weird.

while mr smear was getting ready for bed, i took gd aside to discuss something troubling she'd said to mr smear during our family meeting. she did not take it well.

i don't recall much more of the night, but i did go to bed relatively early, and i guess i slept alright.

today:

back to work. i started my day setting up my paypal business account, then went to the office. i'd say it was a pretty good day, but mr smear's call in the morning was the start of a series of shit moves, and it set a nasty tone both because i suspected he was up to no good and because i told him so in rather crude terms before i realized that i was on speaker with the head of his arts program :/

aside from trying to help my buddy work through a couple of gotchas (one surprise in how java handles floats, and that floats were used in a system that deals with large quantities of money, and one surprise in how a database index was built in a way that renders it unusable), i managed to push through a fix that unblocked me for testing and begin the next piece of work. i had to leave the office early to join gd and meet mr smear's new therapist, but between the bus rides and after we got home, i managed to run a successful test and establish that the second one wouldn't be worthwhile.

the therapist seems nice, though i don't know if the two of us made such a good impression. i think she knows everything she needs.

coming home turned sour because gd insisted that we stop somewhere to pick up hummus, and we explored multiple blocks and then sarona, and there was no hummus (none open, at least). eventually, once i was thoroughly pissed off, we settled on getting the fuck home and ordering hummus via wolt.

fuck.

dinner would have been great if it wasn't for mr smear pushing buttons non-stop. that wasn't good for the vibe, but then while i was getting out of the shower i suddenly remembered what gd had told me he'd done in the afternoon - i warned him if i catch him or hear of him taking his phone into the bathroom again (he was pretending to use the toilet to sit on his phone and avoid doing his homework) i will fuck him up.

i don't know if the threat will work or not, but holy shit, that kid seems to be in dire need of some good ol' capital punishment.

it's been an hour or so, and i guess i'm still sitting with that shit on my chest. i've been upgrading my telephony project, and as soon as i'm done with the current phase i think i'm going to try to get some sleep.