anxiously quiet

 we did a lice treatment last night before showering and going to bed very late, a very oily treatment, and my eyes are still irritated and they feel oily :(

yesterday morning was all about the pharmacy mission and weekend shopping. and monitoring and responding to the comments on gd's post, some of which were very angry at gd's observations on the neglect of children's hygiene, and some of which were very validating.

i ended up spending a good chunk of the day* on the auto-doc project, and then a very little bit of time before dinner on the map generator's seed algorithm before dinner. while that was happening, i also got mr smear to draw a couple of sketches of me because i want him challenging himself and practicing portraits, and hopefully i'll be able to get him to do that again today.

* i mean, a legit work day's worth of hours, though a lot of working with AI is firing off a prompt, switching to youtube, and then reviewing the results a few minutes later. but i also used a "teach-me" skill i've been working with since thursday (inspired by one of the guys at the game dev meetup), and i used it to verify that one of the big changes i've made to my auto-doc project actually makes sense.

[goes away, comes back a bit later, eyes feeling a little bit of relief]

the two puffs i took last night were very effective, and i slept.

today so far: reading some more of my favorite thing is monsters, doing a little more cleaning of the top of the kitchen cabinet (the third round in eight months, making progress), and then a whole bunch of nothing (minesweeper while "catching up" on youtube), now it's breakfast time and then... who knows?

the end of a week

 i took a puff last night before bed, but it didn't make me sleepy and i ended up waking up much earlier than i wanted to. but i didn't struggle with my back or hip flexors, whether that's because of the acupuncture or because of the weed doesn't really matter.

i was actually going to try the medication the doctor prescribed me, which sounds great on paper but turned out to be an anticholinergic, and i'd quite frankly rather continue with my possible sleep-deprivation path to dementia than take a practically guaranteed path. just sayin'.

...

most of my work day revolved around completing the backfill, and discovering that an external tool that's recently been introduced has been starving the processes, slowing everything down and then killing them when they hit an arbitrary timeout 🙄

one of my client team came to me to discuss the fact that i'm leaving - he'd just found out - but later the boss told me everyone had been informed on tuesday. i don't know what's going on, but whatever. dx and i discussed a game idea he had when he was a teenager that's absolutely brilliant, hopefully one day we'll collaborate on it :)

i got home, emptied my bag and took mr smear to the school to pick up his books for the next year. on the way home, we came across a really nice kitchen store and i found mugs!

the bus ride back was apparently mr smear's best ever, mainly because he was so excited about how modern and clean it was :P

we arrived just in time for dinner, and the simpsons, followed by a conversation with my mom (including teaching her some AI fundamentals) and... letting mr smear play plague inc before showering and then going to bed just as late as we did...

...

so i got up early this morning, and enjoyed my coffee while reading more of my favorite thing is monsters on the balcony, put together the new fan, freaked myself out by looking at our financial situation, and am now getting ready to make myself breakfast [i got distracted, now it's eaten already] and do some game dev / ai experimentation.

...

"super lice". of course. fan-freaking-tastic. gd's just sent a warning to the class parents' group which basically feels like posting a sign on mr smear's back :/

circles

having barely slept the night before, and with my hip flexors threatening, i took a puff. i'm still tired from the sleep deficit, but i slept really well. it's weird to sleep well and not remember dreaming.

i got up, had a coffee, looked for an didn't find my last MRI, then i walked to the bus stop and went to the clinic for an acupuncture session. my body was profoundly calm for most of the duration of the treatment, though i did develop a random itch that made my leg twitch, and i've just gotten home (trying hard to stay in the "comfort" bubble in spite of the world around me, i think next time i'll walk instead of taking a bus) and am having a quick breakfast before heading to the office.

...

i made some progress on the map generator problem before going to the office, and the work day was mostly completing the backfill (it still required some fixing). i came home for lunch, then returned for a talk by a south african "CTO" that turned out to be a thorough waste of 45 minutes of my life that i'll never get back. the title of the talk had been misleading: i thought it was going to be around organizing a company's structures around AI, and instead it was about how a junior dev became a senior dev with a fancy title and how the south african tech industry is years behind us in terms of working with AI.

a little later i walked past my client team and inquired after the weirdness that was going on - my client / the boss was standing there with tears streaming down his face, and i was offered a piece of a little yellow pepper to try.

it turned out to be a reaper that the boss had home grown. the first little piece i took hit me hard in the throat, but i barely noticed it in my mouth. the second piece was substantially thicker and full of seeds, and i made a point of chewing it thoroughly. it had a delayed action, and i ended up regretting it. it must have taken about an hour to completely stop burning...

i had a good sync with my manager, and on my way out made a suggestion to dx for the problem he was stuck with, which i hope helped.

i came home early, and walked with mr smear to the library to switch out a couple of his books. while there, i had a fun conversation with the librarian, who lit up when i talked about how we'd just finished the eighth season of the simpsons and the importance of monoculture especially with regards bridging the communication gap between parents and their children.

the walk there and back was full of interesting conversation, and by the time we got home i'd put in 17K steps in addition to the hour and a half of rollerblading the night before. i stretched a bit before dinner, after which i had a little too much dessert and some arak for good measure. i was ready to go to bed, but i still had to wait about an hour for mr smear to shower and brush his teeth 🤦‍♂️

...

well, the calm has been slowly seeping away and i'm feeling my "wry neck" again. oh, well.

sleep journal entry

mentally restless, and severe hip flexor and lower back discomfort. hard stretching before going to bed and in the middle of the night wasn't enough. i barely slept, most of the night was either lying uncomfortably (or in pain) or with my brain working on the infrastructure for mr smear's game.

the doing feeling

 today was tuesday. i honestly don't know where to begin, and i'm sure i'll miss something.

the second volume of my favorite thing is monsters is off to a good start.

gd and i had a very serious relationship talk this morning, which went very positively, but it was addressing something that's probably just a feature of our marriage and we'll have to manage it in a loop 🤷‍♂️

i spent most of my work day babysitting and troubleshooting the backfill, i'm still encountering small surprises. my manager informed my team that i'm in a notice period, but he did it in an uncomfortable way, and then he told me they were planning on making an announcement, but as far as i know the only person who's been told is dx, and he already knew. whatever they're doing, it's really weird.

my two teammates of the past eight months are now both members of my async game jam 🤘

my manager hasn't done anything about my auto-doc project, so i went over his head and sent a brief directly to the guy in charge of tech direction...

pioneer wanted me to sign an NDA before sharing an app design, i convinced her that she was being silly but once i saw what she wants to build i understand that it's way beyond "an app". i also posted this morning looking to see if there's interest in a hebrew language meetup, which it appears there is.

i left early, switched computers at home, and headed to a game dev meetup. i spent most of the non-talk time speaking to a coworker, i'm grateful for the advice and knowledge he shared but it did get a little awkward at some point, because he apparently isn't great with social cues. null sweat, though, because i learned a lot this evening, and all three talks were surprisingly entertaining!

- when to build infrastructure, when to hack

- how to identify and test good ideas

- tips on game dev collaboration / team building, and the basic idea behind building for steam

as i was leaving, my mom called to share how excited she was to be enjoying life of brian on her new television ^_^

i got home in time to eat some dinner, say good night to my mom with my family, and then decide to go rollerblading in spite of not feeling entirely up to it.

i don't know if my problem tonight was being out of shape, anaemic, or just lazy, but aside from some rather brutal uphills and leaving half an hour early and barely managed to get home without collapsing, i had a great time!

...

something's been happening these past few weeks, and i'm starting to feel like i'm getting back into a groove i haven't been in since before i left israel - i'm *doing* shit, and feeling progress, lots of different kinds of things but all somehow related and working together. i'm feeling *potential*. and it's nothing short of thrilling.

...

it took me a while to cool down enough to shower, i had a cold shower, and now i'm going to stretch a little bit more and go to bed.

some of the surprises were good

 i had a rough hour or so last night with my hip flexors, but otherwise i managed to get some pretty good sleep (going by the fact that i remember that i dreamed)

i started the day with volume 2 of my favorite thing is monsters, and aside from that and grocery shopping online i don't recall doing anything interesting.

work began with two conversations about game development - dx has apparently begun trying his hand at it, and one of the other guys showed some interest as he worked on simulations as part of his degree - and a little bit of jumping between tasks.

at noon, i received a phone call from the immigrant employment woman - i'll call her pioneer - and we talked for about an hour, this seems a natural fit for a partnership and she appears to be on board with my vision for a digital kibbutz. immediately afterwards, i received a message from a high school teacher i met last week informing me that she might have found some interesting people to work on another project of mine, one that ties in with the former.

this is all very exciting.

unfortunately, i learned that a meeting i was trying to set up with someone at my alma mata isn't going to happen, and i'm pretty disappointed because it should be something totally aligned with their values...

i came home for an employer group meeting, some of which was quite enlightening, and after an hour or two of more work i called it a day and mr smear and i strapped on our rollerblades and went for a ride.

oh, i watched a couple of my more recent spoken word pieces [1] [2], and i have the strangest sensation of wonder that i wrote those, because for years i've been feeling less than inspired and capable.

dinner was delicious, and i ate plenty, and then i gorged myself on chocolate, liquorice allsorts and whatever the fizzer-like candies are called. then we had a chat with my mom, which included a big discussion about mr smear's barmitzvah plans, and after saying goodnight to mr smear gd and i watched a bit more of ludwig.

i was already in bed, but then gd walked into the fan carrying a cup of water which was somehow my fault, so now i'm cooling off and hoping to get back into sleep mode soon.

a skip and a leg day

 did i... did i skip a day?

yesterday:

i spent a couple of hours on mr smear's game yesterday, but the biggest event of the day was watching die hard together, which was the only screen time mr smear was allowed until dinner because he'd been pretty rude to me in the morning.

my son discovered liquorice allsorts and i discovered my sunflower seeds had the words "unsalted" written in large print on the packet that i hadn't registered when i bought them :(

the rest of my day was doing not much, but lots of it :P

oh, and i had a good chat with vfmp for the first time in ages. i'd come up with a prank to play on his antisemitic brother, and we both laughed hysterically as he told me a story of their sibling rivalry and the results of him exploiting a cheat in a game they used to play together 😈

dinner was sushi again (^_^) and more of the wonder years. each episode generates interesting discussions, necessary discussions that mr smear doesn't necessarily want to have :P

he got to play more thief after dinner as compensation.

today:

i slept pretty well again last night. i got a variety of stuff done today, but my work day was mainly me jumping between tasks and struggling to make real progress on any one thing. lots of small disappointments.

one of them being that after generating enough data at the end of last week, my cost estimates turned out to be considerably lower than i anticipated...

around 4pm i decided to get up from my desk and walk mr smear to the comics library and back. we picked up my favorite thing is monsters vol 2 and doomsday clock, along with volumes 4-5-6 of attack on titan for mr smear, after discovering that the books on the shelves are doubled up and we hadn't noticed all this time!

i advised mr smear as he signed up for an account on a website that asks you to confirm you're over 18 (it's a monster wiki, i'm pretty sure i'm doing the wrong thing), while i played around with agent frameworks and specced out some more work on his game.

dinner was delicious, not-quite-sushi but similar, and we watched an episode of the wonder years that we essentially had to force mr smear through as he died inside from "14th hand embarrassment" - yes, 7x as worse as 2nd hand - but he survived the trauma in spite of his protests 😂

between then and now, i came across a post on facebook from a woman who seems to have the same idea i do about employing immigrants, it looks like we might have some common ground we can cooperate with so i'm quite excited!

...

i'm feeling my hip flexors getting irritated again, i had a couple of days' reprieve while my back hurt and now i'm uncomfortable :/

vicarious horror

 holy shit, inside is not something to play when you're getting ready for bed. absolutely, awfully beautiful limbo-like experience with a lot more holocaust trauma than i was expecting.

[passes out before completing the post]

our walk together to the store was as much exercising our game design legs as our physical ones. when we got home, mr smear played thief while i chatted with horseman, who's been building an interesting crypto protocol that i finally kind of understand. but then he spoke to me about a different one he's planning and everything got jumbled up in my head :P

we stuffed outselves on gd's vegan sushi for dinner, watching the wonder years and pausing to ensure that mr smear's familiar with the woodstock performance of with a little help from my friends, as well as the songs where have all the flowers gone and blowing in the wind, and closing with a conversation about the cringe that kevin arnold was so afraid of versus the intensity of the cringe that he generated in order to avoid it.

(i think it was during the first part of the dance scene that both gd and mr smear literally climbed under the table 😂)

and how teenage hormones make us behave like idiots.

...

by the time we got to dinner i'd managed to get mr smear's game starting with a randomly generated map, using a system i'm pretty pleased with and that's theoretically portable to my game as well ^_^

in spite of inside making my heart race, i managed to fall asleep pretty quickly and i slept surprisingly well. it's been a pleasant start to the day so far, i'm not sure what i or we are going to be doing but i suspect it'll be mostly indoors activities.

shut-in

 after posting i lay back on the couch for twenty minutes, then was jolted awake by a call from the plumber, who was on his way. he completely replaced the pipes under the sink, and he did it at no additional cost, which was generous even though he had left it in a worse state than he found it yesterday.

overall, i was very happy to give him a solid rating; what a pleasure it is working with a professional.

what followed was a few hours - i exaggerate not - burning through tokens and becoming more and more infuriated by the fact that i couldn't get the table in my game to render with depth. it was only after a number of times giving up and then coming back to it that i eventually understood that the whole time, the camera had been at the precise angle that would never see the side of it 🤦‍♂️

during that time, gd and mr smear had some followup drama to the lice - gd had to give him a proper haircut today, and the two of them were not vibing...

with everything else that's been happening, i'd completely forgotten that we were going south with nystire for some camping/stargazing! between all the goings-on and the outbreak since the night before, it just wasn't happening and we're still bummed out about it :(

instead, this afternoon took an uncomfortably quiet turn. after taking a little break, mr smear and i finally got to work on his game idea, which has led to some interesting arguments and some architectural decisions that are as exciting to me as the actual game is to him. i realized, while we were talking, that blue prince has provided great inspiration for his horror hotel and also, unconsciously, the level system for my tarot game!

now i've kneaded the challah-peño and mr smear and i are going to do some quick, last-minute shopping as an excuse to say we got some exercise today :P

much thursday

 yesterday began with reading more of my favorite thing is monsters (volume 1 of 2, i just learned), which i just completed now.

it's sublime. between the phenomenal artwork, the gut-wrenching stories, and the real-ness of the characters, this is an absolute masterpiece.

the big story from yesterday morning was having the plumber - clearly a devout muslim, making his jewish blessings contrast starkly with his kneeling to bless his cup of water - do a great job of replacing the cistern and a not-so-great job of turning a small leaky faucet into an unusable one. now i've got to get him to come back for the latter before the weekend...

the work day was unusually calm. i had a big, healthy side-dish lunch from the shuwarma place that i picked up on the way to the office, i'd been feeling faint and weak again and i'm becoming increasingly concerned about possibly being anaemic. i got the backfill started, and it went pretty smoothly, and over the course of the afternoon i got the action plan worked out for the work my client team and i have been discussing, all using opus and all far cheaper than using sonnet.

let's pretend that makes sense.

by the time i went upstairs to join everyone for happy hour - a farewell pizzas-and-drinks for the AI team lead - i was ready to trigger the implementation and i left the agent with an instruction to document every step of it and make best guesses that didn't conflict with the established plan.

when i got back to my desk more than half an hour later, it was still running. after about an hour, it was done, and while i haven't evaluated the results yet - i was just waiting for it to finish so that i could go home - on the surface it looks good and i was shocked by how little it cost relative to what i've been spending on tokens since they introduced the budget a couple of weeks ago.

anthropic + bedrock = scam.

i dropped my bag off at home and took mr smear for a walk, a lot of which was spent discussing his game design ideas. i've agreed to help him in a bit, when his first screen time kicks in, to start building his game with him.

what a time to be alive.

gd's chili took a lot longer to be ready than she'd expected, but it was delicious. we watched another episode of the wonder years, and then i worked on my tarot game until i couldn't keep my eyes open any more and went to bed.

...

over dinner, mr smear discovered that he was having another outbreak around his eye. it's been quite a while, and considering the fact that i'd been considering taking him to the pool soon i'm grateful it happened before that, and that we didn't once again worry that the pool was causing it...

i didn't sleep very well, so i'm tired still, but that's just par for the course these days 🤷‍♂️

nodding

 i guess the advantage of having a nerve pinched in the middle of my back is that it seems to be blocking my hip flexor discomfort. "conditioned pain modulation", huh? i'll take it.

i got up with my alarm, remembered (thanks to gd's note) not to drink anything but water, and walked to the lab, arriving early enough on a quiet day to be out of there within minutes. i went past my clinic on the way back, picked up my "not sleep" meds (i still haven't bothered to see what they are) at the pharmacy, went looking for mugs at the mall, didn't find any, and hopped on a bus home.

i was just getting off the bus when gd realized where i'd gone and called me to ask me to pick up her prescription 🙄

[i've seen the bloodwork results already, it looks like i might well be anaemic]

i had a quick breakfast, got in touch with another plumber, then headed to the office.

over the course of the day, the plumber and i exchanged messages and it looks like he's coming to install a much cheaper cistern than the other guy was interested in arranging. now the other guy's upset that we're going with the cheaper option. either way, we can't get a solution quickly enough, as the leak has escalated...

funny story: the plumber coming tomorrow is an arab who keeps saying "baruch hashem" and "be'ezrat hashem", and i don't know what to make of it :P

two things happened when i arrived at the office: the first, i agreed to schedule a meeting with the new potential client tomorrow evening, and was subsequently informed that it was to be this evening. the second, i had a chat with a doctor from the complementary medicine section at our clinic which resulted in appointments being scheduled for acupuncture and feldenkreis.

the morning was a bit messy, but included my client putting me on a claude subscription instead of the pay-as-you-go plan. i got a chance to burn through some tokens in the evening, and i used opus for some real planning, and i've gotten the feeling that not using opus might have been my biggest mistake since optimization for it a week or two ago 🤷‍♂️

my manager and i had agreed that they'd make an announcement about my contract ending tomorrow, and that i'd let dx know before the formal announcement, so after the two of us talked with the other contractor (who seems to be in a less certain situation than me) i asked him to join me on the balcony and i broke the news to him.

initially he was devastated, which was really heartbreaking, but we managed to put some positive spin on things and by the time we returned he seemed to be in better spirits. while he was talking, he happened to drop an interesting piece of information, and that was how i discovered that the interview i had scheduled for the evening was with his previous employer!

then i came inside and received an update from my manager that they'll make an announcement about me leaving some time next week.

i went home for lunch, then caught a bus to the office, surprised to discover that since they completed the work by sha'ul hamelech there's now a simple line switch instead of a ten minute walk in the heat 🤘

my interview simulation was comfortable and useful, after which i went to work on a design / planning session for my client team (we've all agreed on a set of compromises that seem to be coherent). by the time i decided that i wanted to do the introduction interview from home it was already deep rush hour, so i made myself a cup of tea and found myself a quiet space.

the interview went smoothly, rather well, in fact. the group lead called me afterwards to advise me against it on grounds that it seems boring, but in my estimation the real challenge will be leading / guiding them in process hygiene and AI adoption. she agreed that it was work a second interview, at least.

as i've said before, and i'll say it again, i'm extremely passionate about having food on the table and a roof over my head :P

i bussed home, marveled sadly at my son's new haircut, talked to gd, fired off a message to the guy who used to be the head of my study program, had an encouraging text chat with one of the educators i spoke to on monday night, then headed out with mr smear for a walk to the park. we stopped along the way to watch a worker throwing building debris out a third-story window, discussing all manner of things, and when we were almost home mr smear said something random that gave me some inspiration for my tarot game.

i described it to gd, and we got into the weeds a little bit, and i think it's the first time my wife has been as legitimately excited about an idea of mine as i am ^_^

we watched another couple of episodes of the wonder years over dinner, spoke to my mom between them, got ready for bed, completed a run of slay the spire 2 i've been doing in stages over the course of about a week now, rested a little, posted this, and now, i think, i'm just about ready to sleep.

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.

laying tracks

 i made some auto-doc progress this morning, then realized on my way out that i didn't have time to make it to the office, participate in the daily, and return home in time to take mr smear to the doctor... our daily went on for so long, however, that we ended up almost being late for the doctor in any event - i spent ten minutes of the meeting walking and talking to catch the bus to the clinic :P

mr smear's primary complaint was pain that the doctor suspected him of exacerbating by "testing" it. he denied doing so, and she immediately began laughing - he was staring out the window and visibly testing his jaw, making it hurt and continuing to deny he was doing it while we both watched 🤦‍♂️

anyway, he seems fine. and she renewed his prescriptions, which is very much appreciated because she's about to go on vacation for a while - it wasn't a waste of a trip.

after a brief mission to the pharmacy (and encountered loads of mall people), i dropped him off at home and continued on to the office. my coworkers seemed to enjoy the leftover challah-peño. it was a bit of a weird day, with my teammate and i (mostly him) eventually figuring out why mlflow hadn't been working properly and me and the client team having deep conversations about how to redesign - or whether to redesign - a troublesome AI mechanism.

i came home and took mr smear for a walk in the park, on the way back we bumped into big data who handed me another bottle of cider and invited us for a game session. i allowed mr smear a taste of the cider at dinner, which he enjoyed a little too much 🙄

we watched the simpsons: season 8 episode 17 first aired on march 2nd, 1997. they're discussing people who were visiting israel and were kidnapped. OMG the ribbon.

after dinner we went upstairs and were introduced to ticket to ride. i've never played it before, and it was so much fun! also, mr smear did pretty well in spite of the fact that he was so engrossed in arranging his "tracks" that he missed a fundamental aspect of the gameplay... i think everyone who was playing was disappointed when it was called off due to bedtime :P

mr smear and i showered, brushed teeth, and negotiated watching pacific rim - i guess we'll find out tomorrow if he gets up early without a bad vibe, but even gd was up for the final act of the movie and it was glorious ^_^

it's close to midnight. please let me sleep 🙏

...

oh! someone posted an israeli version of jones in the fast lane - ג'ונס בנתיבי איילון - and it's so good mr smear was engaged while i was giving it a try!

sleep journal entry

 neck pain throughout the night, it didn't prevent me from sleeping initially but it prevented me from going back to sleep once i'd woken up.

gd's woken up with serious back trouble, so it looks like i'm going to be taking mr smear to the doctor today...

self-care and kaiju

 i didn't sleep very well last night - no puff - but it wasn't nearly as bad as thursday night (or the nights before tuesday), so i wasn't a total wreck come morning. i got out of bed super early, and immediately got to work flipping between the auto-doc upgrades and the PRD my boss asked me for.

a couple of hours later, the latter was completed and delivered, and i headed out to the hospital sleep clinic to make an appointment for november, and on my way back booked an appointment for our GP to discuss blood tests and a pain clinic referral. when i got home, i booked a consultation with the complementary medicine clinic as well, which i've been meaning to do for a couple of years now.

i spent the next hour and a half working, finally putting my laptop to sleep just as mr smear and i accompanied my sister out the door and to the airport... i made the changes suggested by an article i'd read on the weekend, and so far it looks like it's made the difference, even with claude's sonnet model. so my tokenspiracy theories weren't so wrong after all 🤔

gd couldn't join us, sadly, so the two of them had their emotional farewell in the entrance instead.

it was hot and muggy today, it seems like the heat wave warning we got a few days ago wasn't for nothing.

once we got my sister to security, we said our goodbyes and then went downstairs to find a quiet place for me to talk to my client, who'd been trying to get hold of me ever since we'd left the apartment. while mr smear kept a table and read, i had a fifteen minute chat with him that was very positive; i don't know what he was expecting, but he was kinda thrown by how "maturely" i was taking it... i mean, this is not my first consulting rodeo, so... 🤷‍♂️

what did surprise me was that my notice period is a month and a half, which is longer than the other guy.

mr smear was hungry, and the airport bakery was all dairy, so we agreed i'd get him hummus. i had some of it myself, so i can attest that it was brilliant, and that i understand why he felt the need to inform the guy that it was the greatest hummus he's ever had. it wasn't the best hummus i've ever had, but it was pretty damned good, and he even enjoyed the chickpeas themselves which he usually doesn't.

so that was cool.

we came back via azrieli, which involved a lot of stairs up to the mall and a rush to wash my hands of whatever wetness some stranger managed to bestow on one of them 🤮

then we caught a bus home, both of us having had our fill of the sweaty, jam-packed, no-sense-of-personal-space masses. i was absolutely exhausted, but i'd been exhausted all day, so i chugged a coffee and worked hard until i was done (waiting on a review), and then crashed on the couch for a while.

when i came to, i finished my tea and did a little auto-doc work while playing inscryption, then it was dinner time and we watched the simpsons, ate a delicious dinner, had a long chat with my mom, showered, and sat down on the couch to continue watching pacific rim.

pacific rim is incredible, it's gorgeous, it's wonderful, it's insane, and it's such a trip enjoying it together with my son!

now he's gone to bed (he's been reading himself to sleep the past while, it's summer holidays), and i think i'm going to turn off and play some more before i go to bed. it's been a pretty big day.

cotton wool brain

 oh, yeah... i remember now. one of the reasons i usually avoid cannabis is that it renders me extremely slow and unmotivated. after having coffee and writing up my previous post, i tried reading some more of stranger in a strange land. that put me to sleep for another hour or so. after that, i was able to think deep-feeling thoughts about my perpetual all-consuming need to be constantly doing all the things that need to get done, but not able to think useful thoughts about it, and i played a little more inscryption and watched stuff while eating breakfast.

mr smear got up, and i agreed to join him for his inscryption time after breakfast, but after he'd played for a little bit (it was a resumed game we had no context for, and he lost) his friend called to ask him to come over then instead of later. mr smear is not exactly mr spontaneous, but gd and i both pleaded with him to go, and then threatened him, and even though he initially had a shitty attitude, by the time we walked out together he was fine, and he ended up having a really good time.

hell, his friend's mom took the two of them to see the new spiderman movie, so he had a pretty good afternoon.

the challah-peño was much hotter than usual. neither of us noticed last night at dinner, but mr smear and i both noticed this morning.

i ended up taking another long nap after dropping mr smear off, and woke up to the sounds of my sister heading out for a spell. it was only after my third coffee that my brain-fog started lifting and i slowly started getting into Doing Stuff.

later, gd ran my sister through a tarot reading, which combined with the game idea i was discussing with sailor to inspire me to design something. once i had a rough idea, i then realized that one of my problems when creating a project in unity is that i'm overly-ambitious and immediately planning the full game when what i really need to be doing is iteratively exploring building the individual mechanisms that will ultimately come together to form the end result.

so today, i focused on a menu screen for a card game. between my idea and codex's access to the code and the unity mcp, i'm very, very pleased with the result ^_^

after mr smear got home, i let him have some screen time before my sister and i took him to the beach. he moaned most of the way there, and really got on my nerves, and even using ice cream as a motivator only lasted a few minutes...

... so he sat on the beach and played with his feet in the sand, refusing to put on swimming trunks and join us, and we had a great time in the incredible water (the temperature was perfect), and then enjoyed a magnificent sunset while dragging mr smear off the beach to go and get ice creams.

i almost offed my sister when we sat down at the table, due to a misunderstanding i pulled the chair out from under her as she was sitting and barely managed to get it back in time O_o

that was when mr smear told me that he'd had a pretty good day. i gave him a fist-bump and pretended to have forgotten all the grumblings and occasional violence and general meanness... on our way out of there, though, we asked him to take a photo of us and he refused, so while fortunately a stranger was happy to help us it didn't improve my vibe much :/

the walk to the bus was pleasant. the bus itself? first, a horrible smell of a passenger who peed himself, second, escaping from that smell into the high pressure of a crowded middle section with mr smear getting stepped on.

we got off a stop early, enjoyed a nice walk home, showered, ate gd's delicious concoction, watched half an hour of pacific rim, and since then i've been writing this and upgrading my auto-doc at the same time. and in a few minutes, i'm going to bed.

...

my sister's returning to london tomorrow, and none of us - including her - want her to go. we talked about that at length this afternoon, i really hope we can figure something out.

chewing on life's gristle

omg i'm not crazy!

according to this article, claude *did* get dumber and more expensive, but it's my own fault for not reading the release notes :P

...

our upstairs friends came over for a bit - gd treated them to a preview of the sushi and onigiri, and they treated me to a bottle and a half of rather nice cider. they also offered to help us rescue my sister from ra'anana, as two of the weekend busses didn't show up and she was stuck out in the heat for over two hours while continuing to believe that one was coming... one eventually did arrive, though.

i just couldn't decide what to do with myself last night after dinner, so i continued playing inscryption and achieved a couple of minor events i'd never seen before. i didn't realize / had forgotten that you have to lose a game between getting the dagger and removing the... no spoilers... and discovered that defeating the wall of grizzlies twice and winning without meeting the final conditions leads to getting your death card pinned on the door with a little medal :P

[one run with unkillable squirrels with unkillable friends, including a black goat and an ouroboros. one run with an unkillable queen ant and an unkillable black goat. seriously OP]

i'm very grateful that last night's puff worked again. perhaps i didn't take a proper one on thursday night, i find with a vape it's hard to tell 🤷‍♂️

my sister's leaving tomorrow already, and it feels like none of us really wants her to leave...

small accomplishments

we got shit done today. it took a while to get everyone roused, and gd and i had a bit of a tiff along the way, but the two of us abandoned our child to the screen gods and caught a bus to the shoe repair store where i dropped off my very expensive but now quite broken sandals, and she convinced me to listen to him and do the decidedly non-vegan thing of repairing them with leather, which makes me quite uncomfortable :/

we hit the supermarket - which is a surprisingly good one - on arlozorov, and eventually got out of there with most of what we needed. we caught a bus back home, yelled at mr smear for having put the air-conditioner on when all the windows were wide open, and then mr smear and i went on another mission to the street north of us, which required three stops but we got pretty much everything that remained on the list.

then mr smear and i left for the mall, catching a very cramped mini-bus and mr smear managed to keep it together in spite of the small kids around him. we paid the optometrist a visit and ordered his new glasses (apparently his eyesight has improved a little), along the way happening to pass the second hand game store and asking on a whim if they had what mr smear's been begging for for his birthday - motion controllers for the ps4.

i'd called another shop earlier about that, and learned that nobody's selling them or repairing them (the mongoose left us a couple that seem to be broken or in need of battery replacement), so i was surprised to learn that they had one pair, and they gave me a bit of a discount (still quite expensive).

so mr smear was very excited.

then we did one last mission to pick up another fan and a kettle because ours died this week, and caught a bus home. on the bus, a conversation we had led to mr smear deciding that he really wants to write a diss track response to dan bull because one of his songs isn't as amazing as the others, and i have to admit i'm quite impressed with what he's got so far!

i was crashing on the way home - recalling that i didn't sleep last night - but i made myself a coffee and wrestled with the motion controllers. poor mr smear, standing there with the vr helmet on and the controllers finally connected and strapped on, and discovering that the games he was hoping to play with them don't support them :(

we should have done some research first... anyway, i tried.

i tried to do something of value, but ended up opening inscryption instead (i really wanted to play braid, but it doesn't work on mac), and i've just kneaded the challah-peño and can't decided what my next steps are. perhaps nothing.

upended

 there's this ridiculous idea that's conned most of the software industry, that human engineers can and will be replaced by AI. that AI is cheaper than the human labor that it replaces. that driving adoption means tokenmaxxing, that AI vendors will continually reduce costs and improve the models. that the playing field has been leveled and anyone with an AI agent at their disposal now has godlike powers.

these past couple of months, the chickens have started coming home to roost. all the prices have gone up, but the vendors aren't making any money because it's still costing them more compute per token than they're asking for. so they, in turn, are dialing down their models because the dumber they are, the more loops it takes to get stuff done.

very few companies can afford the burn.

my client is one of the many that can't. so, weeks after a town hall in which they explained how finances were tight, followed a short time later by explaining that autonomous agentic workflows are going to be the primary mechanism for software delivery and on-call resolution, followed by a week of costs going up while productivity tanks... i arrived at the office on wednesday morning to discover that everyone had been allocated a $12 per day AI budget.

average costs per day had been in the high double digits to low triple digits the whole week.

there was a massive uproar, and the budget was increased to $30 per day. barely enough to get anything done, and engineering is beginning to understand that this effectively means returning to the good old days of having to understand what you're doing and craft code like peasants. there's only one problem, though: last year the company fired half its staff, and rotated all the rest, so nobody actually has any experience with the software they're officially responsible for. hell, barely anybody even knows which software is under their ownership. at a guess, i'd say that the ratio of software engineers to software repositories is somewhere around 5:100, which is something i think about a lot since learning about conway's law and organizational scaling.

it'd be funny if it wasn't so sad. and the saddest part is that these blunders are hurting real people, with real families to provide for and real mortgages to pay off.

...

i spent a large chunk of my day fixing a deployment pipeline - some random devops guy had made a change a couple of months ago that literally did nothing but break it - while expensively asking the AI tough questions to ensure that it wasn't making shit up. i also had a lot of issues with the company-mandated claude code wreaking havoc with any and every plugin or skill i attempted to work with.

i did take a pleasant break to coach sailor on working with AI, and continuously snipe him for insisting on staying south africa instead of coming home.

...

i came home, took mr smear for a pleasant walk around the park, then returned for dinner, then took another walk with gd and my sister as well, for a tour of our old neighborhood and a good view of a particularly impressive moon.

after getting home and showering, we watched a little but more of redline, then put mr smear to bed and repeated the trick of me taking a puff before passing out and actually sleeping again.

gd says my snore is the most comfortable she's ever heard.

...

i began yesterday doing random shit on the balcony, including trying to help the ex-saffer i met a few weeks ago whose department has just been laid off. i caught up on quite a bit of reading, watching, and had a big breakfast before heading out to the office.

i started my day trying to work with haiku, but anthropic's cheapest, shittiest model is so useless it seemed to be trolling me and i immediately switched back to sonnet. work-wise, i spent most of my day planning and executing a task i had been expecting to get to on monday or tuesday, and thinking very, very hard about my personal AI usage and what a harness should look like. and trying and failing to get anything real done on that last score.

i hit my $30 limit shortly after lunch, but the software to track it hadn't been installed yet, so it seemed fitting that that was the point at which i voluntarily restarted my machine and synced with the rest of the organization :P

...

that was around the time i got a phone call out of the blue from my mentor, who informed me that my client has apparently decided to stop working with outsiders altogether and that the two of us currently embedded with them will be moving on in a month's time. apparently this is a money thing, because their feedback for both of us has been positive, so i guess my town-hall feelings from a few weeks ago weren't wrong...

i asked what i should be focusing on to make sure i get to my next client as quickly and smoothly as possible, and he informed me that between my auto-doc project and consistent publishing of articles he doesn't believe i'll have too much trouble. this is good.

i waited until my counterpart had been informed by his mentor, and the two of us sat on the balcony for half an hour strategizing. he'd been taking the whole thing a bit personally - his new manager has been behaving very strangely since the big reshuffle a couple of weeks ago - and i think it helped him when i put the pieces together and suggested that the manager probably knew this was coming and just isn't very subtle about trying to get ahead of it.

either way, we have a month to focus on up-skilling in AI and we're in a pretty good place to be doing so. i also told him about the up-skilling solution i pitched to the boss, and he's interested in helping me make that happen, so that's good.

...

by the end of the day, i'd installed codex with my personal subscription on my work computer, and delivered a first iteration that looked pretty good, and had an awkward encounter with my client who's pretending everything's cool until they break the news to us on sunday, and had a wild political debate with the AI guys that was actually quite fun.

and stopped myself from "just one last deployment" on a thursday evening :P

mr smear wasn't at home when i arrived, he'd gone off to a new friend's place for a swim. i quickly shared an update with gd (i thought my sister could hear me, so i had to re-tell over dinner), then headed to the hairdresser. crazy singing guy was outside again, harassing the nail salon next door, and i got a pretty decent haircut - i think? - and then came home to shower and do a little more AI work until mr smear got back and we could sit down for onigiri (to celebrate the girls finding a mold) and corn on the cob.

the AI work i did was validating. codex is simply better.

dinner was delicious, then i did a little more fiddling around with AI and unity, and then we all sat down to finish watching redline. redline is a phenomenal movie, with a bizarrely jarring ending (kind of like grease), but really the greatest pleasure in watching it is seeing it as an art delivery mechanism. it's gorgeous, and it's simply mind-blowing seeing how gorgeous it is knowing how it was made.

...

i took another puff last night, but it didn't seem to take. am i already developing a tolerance after two nights? last night was long, and my lower back hurt a bit, and i barely got any sleep between lying restless and uncomfortable, and then i finally had enough just over an hour ago and climbed out of bed and am now sitting on the balcony typing this with half an eye on the world waking up around me.

sleeping powder

my sister suggested something last night, after we'd all gorged ourselves on vegan sushi and my mouth had been filled with regret after allowed mr smear to coerce me into trying a bite of vegan cheese with a marshmallow, which imparted a lasting taste of feet.

oh, and we watched some more of redline, and mr smear is INTO that stuff.

immediately after putting mr smear to bed, i brushed my teeth, made sure to empty my bladder, took a headache tablet and a puff from gd's vape. she didn't think i'd had enough, but i lay down, convinced myself it was going to be alright, slowed my breathing, and woke up this morning feeling a bit groggy, but having actually slept through the night.

...

this post has taken most of an hour to write, primarily because i ended up on a side quest to tag older posts, and secondarily to produce the gif above because i searched hard for it and it apparently didn't exist. now to start my actual day.

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.

* [i started writing up a PRD for a system i've been thinking about since i lived in canada for my boss]

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 currently *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.