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

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

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

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

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

...

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

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

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

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

what a time to be alive.

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

it was a grind.

...

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

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

i should probably go to bed soon.