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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

familia-rity

yesterday:

the last hour and a half of the night was the best hour and a half of the night. i actually slept, and my alarm forcefully ejected me from a dream and got my day off to a (literally) wobbly start.

...

i accompanied gd to the hospital for her toenail appointment that she's been waiting for since april. i think we must have sat in the waiting room, surrounded by wet coughing, for about an hour before we were finally called in. i got a bit of work done, at least.

[stops writing to hunt for and then complain that the kiffness' balkan song isn't available anywhere]

the dermatologist doesn't believe the second toenail incident was fungal, just that gd is susceptible to whatever the fuck is going on. not exactly confidence-inspiring.

on our way out, we took the elevator down and as we were leaving it a 300 pound woman walking out in front of gd stopped suddenly and took a step backwards, landing squarely on gd's recovering toe. un-fucking-believable. after helping gd out of the elevator, and struggling to deal with the combination of her rage and the horror of her toenail likely being re-injured, we parted ways with me warning her to stay away from others for her own safety.

i hopped on a bus home, and was just calling my mother to update her when gd called me to inform me that some old woman had rammed into her in the supermarket - same foot, fortunately missing her toe - jesus fucking christ.

i understand why she felt the need to take a taxi home :/

...

hungry and tired, i stopped at home for breakfast instead of heading through to the office as originally planned, then crossed the bridge and went in for a couple of hours. earlier in the morning i'd threatened my teammates with an openspec workshop, and i took the opportunity to run a private training session with dx and his manager.

...

i returned home for an employer meeting, which turned out to be a presentation by the boss explaining how the whole company is about to experience a massive shift in order to realign with the market trends. i already found our division into backend / frontend / full-stack strange - i've been having difficulty understanding the distinctions since before AI became a thing, probably because i'm a sort-of full-stack engineer, and devops engineer, but not a frontend engineer at all - but now things are getting really interesting and we're going to be divided into the kinds of building we do, and our proficiency with AI and depth of experience with harnesses is going to determine whether we cut it or not.

...

by the time we needed to leave for netanya, gd was certain that she wouldn't be able to join us. she's been properly sick (her stomach, mainly) for days now, and it's really frustrating and disappointing for all of us.

we left the city in heavy traffic, and it took us about an hour and a half to get there, with mr smear complaining about motion sickness the whole way and insisting that using his phone made it better 🙄

the evening with our cousins was just lovely. the food was a big issue for them, but we were fine, and there were soooo maaaaany kiiiiiids which was loud and wonderful. we also walked down the two minutes to the beach for an incredible sunset, and just generally had a great time.

the ride back to tel aviv was quick and whineless, with all of us singing along to my driving playlist (that spans most of a century of good music) and managed to shower and get mr smear into bed around midnight. my first "girlfriend" (who's married to the guy who introduced me to my friends in matric which fundamentally changed my life's direction) finally sent me the summer camp photos i asked for back in may, and they are AMAZING. i can't believe how young we all were!

so that sent me down a rabbit hole of looking through my and gd's photos, which was a trip, and then it was after 1am and i crawled into bed for a relatively good sleep.

bully birds

 i'm very upset right now. i just woke up after a long night; the first part was hours of being too tired to get up, but unable to sleep (restless mind) and being mildly uncomfortable, the second part - or last part, i should say, it was probably an hour or two - was sleeping soundly, feeling pretty good, and then waking up from a dream pissed off at my mother.

we went out to dinner together, and she ordered something called "dinner service". it arrived as a tiny serving for one of something that looked like noodles but with meaty-looking bits in it, with a price tag of R1500. when i asked her if it was as she'd intended, she nonchalantly said yes and took a bite of it. while i was being horrified by the cost, i learned that it was made of some kind of exotically cruel meat (kind of like foie gras), and i told her she'd be paying for it before waking up pissed off about the whole thing.

i got up, brushed my teeth, made myself a cup of coffee, picked up my laptop, and stepped onto the balcony to start my day, only to find a pigeon standing on our little table, having left a giant, wet turd on it as well as having had diarrhea in a couple of spots on the balcony floor. so i had to spend a couple of minutes cleaning all of that up, discovering that some bird had vandalized our glass railings by somehow pooping on it at an upwards angle. i was completely disgusted.

then i started writing this, and when i got to "we went out together" the damned pigeon returned, landing on the balcony railing right in front of me and not caring when i tried to shoo it away - i had to get up and chase it away properly.

fucker.

...

i didn't get any side-project work done yesterday morning, i mostly just went through my employer emails and found myself quite satisfied with the monthly newsletter i hadn't realized i'd been receiving 🙄

i had a good breakfast, went off to the office, and started the day with a particularly positive team daily. 

that was followed by a sad consult with the other contractor, whose reorg isn't going nearly as well as mine - his new manager's doing some messed up stuff and he doesn't know who's now in charge of his contract, and i advised him to immediately update his mentor and our team, let them know what's going on and find out who he's supposed to be reporting to. he's really nervous because he's convinced that our employer's having a hard time getting new contracts and he's worried about being fired... which is fair, but in my opinion if you're facing the same risk either way, it's better to be proactive and get ahead of it as much as you can. also, considering the last few weeks, i have a feeling he's less aligned with and more disconnected from our employer than i am, so if *i* haven't felt totally safe then i'm confident he's not feeling safe *at all*.

my workday was, like the rest of the them this week, flitting between my main project and my golang service side quest. with an uncomfortable half an hour being pulled in to an incident as a suspect, only to discover that my changes had nothing to do with it 😅

i've been working on this main project since the end of april, and it's been a massive (and long) rollercoaster, and yesterday i finally deployed the end-to-end code and was able to start testing it. while i found a couple of bugs at the end of the day, the project is essentially complete and ready for whenever they miraculously figure out the pixel matching component.

i also deployed the final fix to the golang service, so it's officially in good shape and actually maintainable by on-call people if anything goes awry.

for the company happy hour, i was treated to vegan nachos. as the only vegan around yesterday, i felt obligated to consume them, and for the second time had to deal with the weird childishness of a couple of people who made a show of being offended by the existence of vegan food. that aside, i enjoyed them, had a beer, and an exciting conversation with a new friendly who works with AI from another side of the org.

oh, i almost forgot. with all that, a good chunk of the day was spent debating with my friend and coworker. who, btw, has been putting some effort into my blockchain project, for which i'm very grateful. we've been discussing a lot of the current politics and philosophies of AI, and yesterday i (we?) had a really interesting revelation about the nature of consciousness which i'm planning to work through in an article.

...

i don't know what triggered it, but after the happy hour my stomach became extremely unhappy, painfully gassy. it was like that for the next few hours, and i ended up working much later than usual to finish up a report for my incoming and outgoing managers before heading out and doing a shopping mission on my way home. quite a roundabout shopping mission with mr smear, but a successful one and at least our time together was pleasant.

my sister got a bit lost on the way home from her day-trip, but we all arrived just in time for a really nice dinner (at that point my system had mostly calmed down). we talked a lot, and by the time we got up from the table it was quite late and pretty much bedtime for everyone.

...

it's friday morning, and gd's just joined me on the balcony, and my sister and mr smear appear to still be sleeping. i've just run through the plans for the day with gd, and now it's time to get started.

reception

 i'm sitting here on the balcony after a surprisingly good night's sleep, in spite of mr smear's incessant creaking through the night on his air mattress next to my side of the bed.

i spent a good couple of hours yesterday morning working on my auto-doc: i'm very happy with how it's going. i'm so relieved that the presentation went positively that i'm in "calm down" mode. i'm under immense pressure to include certain improvements, write out a one-pager for my team, and get it out the door. all at the same time.

...

i had my quarterly roadmap meeting with my mentor yesterday morning. the roadmap bit went very well, although there was an awkward moment or two when discussing my auto-doc because he suggested that i could have done it without AI generating the documentation. then the real awkwardness began, when he asked how i felt about the company and we got into it over me feeling disconnected and not seeing the bigger picture. it turns out a) linkedin's algorithm just doesn't put all the usual stuff in my feed (granted, i don't use linkedin very often) and b) that while i've been complaining about there not being a company newsletter, i've been receiving a company newsletter in my email - my gmail inboxes were configured by default to only show my primary inbox, and i've been (unconciously) ignoring everything else 🤦‍♂️

once the meeting was over, i flipped through my emails and discovered, to my immense gratitude, that i'd missed an urgent and important email that had a deadline of a couple of days: choosing a gift for rosh hashana. if my mentor and i hadn't gone down that rabbit hole i might've lost my opportunity to pick up a significant shopping voucher, which in our current financial situation makes a very big difference.

a couple of hours after my roadmap meeting, the thing that my mentor had suggested for my auto-doc popped into my head, and i remembered that just that morning i'd read an article on the topic. i reviewed a couple of well-known packages and sent them to him, and was surprised when he immediately called me. not only had he only learned about one of those very packages about half an hour before, but when i explained that it might very well be a good dependency to build in to what i've got i could almost hear the penny drop for him, and he seems to have suddenly understood what all the excitement for what i'm building is about ^_^

...

the rest of the work day was finally uncovering the root cause of the golang service crashes and fixing it, and it was REALLY satisfying seeing the memory usage flatline when i finally deployed ^_^

i also managed to make some progress with my primary project, and after months of shenanigans i'm at a point where i've pretty much finished everything end-to-end but now have no idea how i'm going to actually test it :P

...

i left the office about twenty minutes before we had to leave home to do the airport run, and called gd to make sure she and mr smear were ready to go. of course, that was when she had just decided that she needed to wash the floors in honor of my sister's arrival 🤦‍♂️

i'd left the office in the middle of getting code reviewed and deployed, so in the literal few minutes i was at home i continued, and on the train i continued, and at the airport while waiting for my sister to clear border control i continued. border control gave me a little more time than expected because they had to hunt down her entry in the population registration - she hasn't been here for thirty years, and she left her ID in london - but she got through it eventually and our reunion was fun, funny and emotional :)

we took the train home, and the girls decided that walking the few blocks from the station was fine, which it totally was. the rest of the afternoon / evening was setting up, catching up, a really nice sushi dinner, a long chat with my mom*, and mr smear enthusiastically trying out his present of a beautiful box set of acrylic pens, then everyone getting ready for and into bed really, really late.

* although a bit intimidating, as she brought up the fact that mr smear's barmitzvah is in two years' time and we're not members of a synagogue and celebrations are a big deal that cost quite a lot of money.

...

while getting ready for bed, i saw that the summer camp organizer had registered the refund, which is a big relief.

...

i've been up since before 6am when i heard the front door close as my sister headed out to join our cousins for a day trip to metzada, and i can't believe it's thursday already. it's been a big week. so far. i'm very excited about so many things! a bit anxious, too, but mostly excited.

higher resolution

 i finally got to bed about half an hour after posting, then woke up with a jolt forty five minutes later from a nightmare in which mr smear had "pranked" me by leaving a bunch of dead insects in my bed, and then ignored me completely and became super defiant while i did everything i could to avoid resorting to violence, which all took place outside a door out of which burst the crazy mom from mr smear's class who was ecstatic to have caught me being aggressive, and taunted me by dancing around and wiggling her bum. i woke up furious with mr smear and having to suppress the urge to rouse him from his slumber and give him a thumping.

when i told him the story in the morning - less than an hour later - he was thoroughly entertained :/

mr smear decided - unsurprisingly - that he's done with the summer camp. the organizer said she'd put in for a refund, which will be immensely helpful.

i worked hard on the auto-doc for the next hour or two, the AI taking so long on one of the activities that i ended up staying home for my daily meeting and only then heading out to the office.

i spent the next few hours manically working on all the things at once, and somehow managing to make good progress on the auto-doc, on my primary data pipeline project, and on the golang service i've been helping out with because it's giving me satisfaction to be doing housekeeping for something that carries quite a load and that's been horribly neglected for so long.

lunchtime with the team i used to be embedded with was cool, i shared my inspirations from yesterday's game dev conference and that triggered some very interesting conversations.

i thought my presentation was scheduled for 2pm, so when 1.50pm rolled around and i had just discovered something broken... that was quite intense and disappointing, but discovering the meeting was actually an hour later was a huge relief! i managed to be ready in time ^_^

i was properly nervous and wired for the presentation, but it went well and i got some decidedly positive and constructive feedback. at first it seemed like my team didn't really get what was happening, by the end they agreed that the value it brings is undeniable and i know what they want me to do to try to encourage adoption.

i had a very short post-presentation break to gather my thoughts, and then i jumped onto a call with my actual boss.

...

once upon a time, when i was in the army, i somehow developed "jeep driver's disease". nobody could think of how that developed, i wasn't able to get the recommended surgery done because my rights to a rehabilitation facility were denied as permanent forcers inexplicably give up their lone soldier status, and i was extremely fortunate that at some point it just went away. when i went to a surgeon to check me out, he put on a rubber glove, and i blurted out, twice, that i was feeling really uncomfortable with the examination.

the second time i said it, he lost his temper and yelled at me: "what, you think *I'M* comfortable with doing this?!!"

i thought about this story on my way to work this morning, and that perhaps i'd start my compensation conversation with my boss with it. in retrospect, i'm rather glad i didn't :P

i began the conversation awkwardly, but i managed to say what i needed to say and it was an enormous relief that he handled it very coolly and matter-of-factly. after explaining the industry situation (which i'm already well familiar with) he inquired as to mine, and he expressed understanding and assured me that he'd consider it. the impression he gave me was that he might acquiesce soon, or possibly in a few months during the annual reviews, either way it feels positive.

...

when i called my mom and gd afterwards to let them know how things had gone, i was shaking a little.

during the day i'd pushed an upgrade to the golang service to get better metrics and make their emission more efficient, and looking at the dashboards and reviewing with AI two things became apparent: the first, that the metrics gave much better insight into the constant crashing that this poor service has been undergoing for the past couple of years. the second, that i made the emission so efficient that the frequency of the crashing increased dramatically 😂🤦‍♂️

so i stayed a bit later than i'd have liked preparing the fix, and then i left the office, arguably in the best spirits i've been in a while.

gd sent mr smear to meet me on the way home and help me with a quick grocery run, and then he helped me take out the recycling, which turned out to include a side-quest of finding a bench to dump unused school books on, and then it was time for dinner. t'was a good dinner, and we resumed watching the simpsons (it's been a while, and the last time i mentioned it was a big, unpleasant day), and then it was shower and bedtime and read a bit of alice's adventures in wonderland to mr smear (i starting falling asleep reading about the dormirouse), and i was going to jump into bed but i just had to get all this down first.

cross-ay-eyed

mr smear took the graphic novels back to the comics library yesterday, and i couldn't figure out what i wanted to read before my screen time and then... oh, yes, i wrote up my previous day's adventures, and got not-a-lot done before heading out (back) to the office.

i did not focus on my primary task today. i mean, i made some progress, but for the most part i was heavily invested in the distracting work of resurrecting a retired dependency so that i could fix a bug in it that i need to make the project i resurrected yesterday work properly.

and we had two important meetings yesterday. the first was an engineering all-hands that sounded eerily familiar, with zero irony. i had a little trouble with feeling sleepy, but i woke up to ask a question and had the VP come bouncing up to where i was sitting with the mic, and then very much not like my question about how metrics for velocity conflict with demanding accountability in terms of quality.

at least i managed to catch him for a positive chat immediately afterwards :P

i had a meeting in a fridge phone booth a few minutes later, and i realized just as i signed in that i couldn't find my hoodie. so, on the call but muted, i rushed around the office trying to find it, eventually guessing that it had fallen behind the stands where i'd been sitting, and managing (with enormous relief) to snatch it up and find a booth in time to follow everything.

my new manager is cool - i've worked with him before - but it's not clear how aligned we are on the mission so i had to be really careful to raise all my points in a way that didn't feel confrontational. i think i did alright, but i've now told everyone very clearly that i'm hoping to be able to start experimenting with integrating my hackathon solution by next week; both because it gives me a deadline i have to stick to, and because i'm nervously in a race against time to get *my* opinionated solution in before somebody comes and up with something irresponsible instead :P

when i left the office, i called gd back and we got into it about whether or not we can afford a dog, or will ever be able to afford a dog. that had to be put on hold while i travelled to my employer's office by light rail. there was a lot of tension, but we managed to move through it and had a heavy but important conversation about the challenges gd's been facing with language, community and work over the past few years, and how to approach them.

the meetup at the office was pretty good. not only were the talks not boring (i learned a few things about agentic ai and agentic memory), but i made small talk with a guy who turned out to be another ex-saffer (he went to school with one of my cousins' kids) and the conversation ended up going off the rails in our unique saffer way. it made the eavesdroppers (and there were a couple) a little happier about the hardships they're forced to endure :P

i had a good chat with the head of our group afterwards, though i said something in a clumsy way - i'm sure she doesn't remember, but it's bugging me - and then i bussed home just in time to say goodnight to mr smear and have a bit of a chat before he went to sleep, and watch most of another episode of ludwig with gd, and now...

... i dunno. i think i'm too tired to do anything productive, but also not tired enough to go to bed and actually sleep 🤷‍♂️

positive feedback

 i've realized that i don't suffer from very mild narcolepsy, there are just three specific situations which tell my brain it's safe to turn off and it's really, really hard for me to fight them. the hairdresser's chair, the dentist's chair, and meetings. those are my shutdown buttons. some people count sheep. i count shears, drills and droning.

...

yesterday morning began with a serious effort on my autodoc side project. mr smear left late and under tense circumstances.

most of the day revolved around the broken deployments, which became extra-specially sensitive the moment i realized that the running instances where last deployed several years ago and the "successful" manual deployments i'd seen had never actually done anything 🤦‍♂️

later, i learned from a couple of the more experienced engineers that this kind of thing is actually quite normal.

lunch with the lunch group was fun, although it began with me opening my soup in a way that sprayed it across the table and across one of the guys, which was quite embarrassing.

the big division meeting: i spent about two thirds of the meeting struggling to keep my eyes open, and praying every time i nodded off that i hadn't snored or something. i was very grateful to have come out of the stupor by the time we got to the big announcements, and it's now pretty clear what my new role is and how all the pieces fit.

i like (the idea of) my new role. a lot.

...

then i had a call with my mentor. he gave me some good advice regarding how i communicate with my manager: "i've run into <x>, it's going to cause a delay, i'm taking care of it" is a solid formula that i've used a lot, but i still find it interesting to think of it as a formal structure.

i told him about my role change, and how it fits in with my roadmap, and about my autodoc project. he was very excited about all of it, and offered me some very good advice about when and how i write about it.

and then he informed me that he has feedback for me, both from my client and from my employer: apparently everyone's quite happy with me. this is a huge relief, and it feels good.

long may it last.

...

the last part of the day was all about finalizing the deployment fixes, pushing them and monitoring them. by sheer luck, i saw from the git graph that someone else was working on the repo at the same time, so i got in touch with them directly to inform them of what i was doing and why. aside from blowing their minds, i managed to get them excited about dashboards-as-code and i had them on hand to approve my PRs, so when i left the office it was after making sure that the service is actually serviceable and nothing seems broken.

[quickly stops to flip open the work laptop and double-check that the image tags really were updated]

so i walked out of the office in pretty good spirits ^_^

...

my afternoon and evening were exceptionally gassy. i have no idea what i ate or when, but it went on for hours and was very uncomfortable. you know how "every 'no' brings you closer to a 'yes'"? well, my spin on it is "every fart brings you closer to a shart". fortunately that didn't happen yesterday, but it probably could have.

anyway, i dropped my bag off at home and took mr smear with me to the mall to pick up his second pair of shoes. notable moments: witnessing a bunch of hormone-drunk teenagers harassing a sex-shop worker, buying socks, and a fight over mr smear reporting a clean bus for being dirty. otherwise, we had a pretty good time. and talked a lot, some of which about the LARPiness (or lack thereof) of his summer camp.

we had a very nice dinner while watching a lot more of guardians of the galaxy, and after mr smear was in bed gd and i finished another episode of ludwig. then i went straight to bed, for most of a night's sleep.

the king of the upside-down

 it's monday evening, just about two days have passed and it's been wild.

saturday night:

i spent the following few hours working on my hackathon project, troubleshooting github actions and eventually getting to the point where i'm ready to give the first iteration a try. then i went to bed, and caught a few (about three) hours sleep.

yesterday:

i woke up feeling less than stellar. but i got up, and had a coffee, and then accompanied mr smear to his first day of summer day camp. the first time was a bit complicated, but he managed just fine by himself this morning, so 👍

from the bus to the school we were accompanied by one of his buddies, and it was interested shadowing them and hearing them discussing how much happier they both are at the new school ^_^

i lurked a bit while mr smear registered himself, then made myself scarce and headed back home. the camp is a version of "the academy", the post-apocalyptic survival LARP, and i think that's pretty cool :)

i paid the municipality fees yesterday morning, which are still on the landlord's account. quite frankly, i'd rather they remained that way because he gets a significant discount, and at this point i really don't want to go through the ridiculous circus of recreating our contract and pretending to be moving in...

my first meeting was long, and tough. the guys amicable enough, but my gods he makes me uncomfortable. he's clearly very knowledgeable, but we seem to have a communication problem and he doesn't solve problems quite the way i do. also i was very tired. i was quite amused when we finally came to the conclusion that whether he likes my approach or not, it's the only viable one considering the state of the data.

either way, it was a massive relief when the meeting was over.

i spent quite a lot of time poring over documents my client had sent me over the weekend, which led me to read welcome to gas town, which is completely unhinged.

i managed to complete the morning meeting's change by the time mr smear got home, at which point we sat down and had a serious conversation about his first day; he's bored, he says, because although a couple of the things they did were fun, there was a lot of physical activity that just isn't what he's there for...

either way, he urgently needed sports shoes, so we all went to the mall for what is arguably our least favorite family pastime. the first place we went to - a department store - had very expensive options we weren't thrilled by. the second only had the most expensive shoes, great quality but not for a growing boy. the third... had what we were looking for. aside from a little bit of i've-had-enough drama on mr smear's part, we walked out with a solid pair of shoes and an order for an identical pair one size up at a heavily-reduced price.

there was a little more shopping to be done, then we caught a bus home. gd and i dropped off the shoes, the groceries and the child, and then went across the road to do some more grocery shopping. it was poor timing, lots of customers, one cashier and one self-service, and it took sooo long to get out of there...

over dinner, we started watching guardians of the galaxy. the rest of the evening was a blur. i think i went to bed relatively soon after putting mr smear to bed.

today:

i actually got a good night's sleep last night. my back's still really sore, though.

...

there were a couple of odd threads to pull at work today, the main one being as follows:

a couple of months ago i worked on a small service that nobody else understands. it's written in golang, and nobody in the company works with golang (they fired the team that owner the service), and it hadn't been maintained for a very long time. so i upgraded it to the latest version, and made the changes that needed to be made, and merged them... but nothing happened. i didn't break anything - which i was very grateful for - but what i thought i'd fixed still wasn't fixed, and i had to cut and move on to the big project.

on thursday i had some spare time, and i returned to the service and made an important fix (a serious memory leak). this morning i got permission to push it. i pushed it.

nothing happened.

the AI i used to investigate the dashboards and the logs came to the conclusion that i totally fixed the bug. it repeated this a couple of times, even though the dashboards didn't seem different at all, and so i carried on trying to figure out what was going on.

eventually, i realized that not only were my changes not in production, but neither were my previous ones, nor those of the couple of people who also touched this service in between. that the CI workflow  entitled "build - test - deploy" that ran successfully only builds and tests, but does not deploy.

the CI/CD workflows have never been CD, the deployments have only ever been manual, and nobody responsible for this service knows this.

you can't make this shit up.

...

oh! and the other consultant working with my client came by my desk after putting some pieces of data together and determining that there are people being fired by our employer for not being able to find clients. it calls the "i have job security" thesis into question, it doesn't feel so good.

...

in the afternoon, i travelled to my employer's office for a group meeting. i got called up, unprepared, to tell a story about failures at scale, and told the story of me returning to work after paternity leave and having to rewrite the project from scratch, getting to the deadline with everything working beautiful and discovering a bug during the demo that the managers saw and terminating the project.

the barbecue wasn't my thing, but they'd brought in a serious quantity of good hummus and falafel so i was sorted. i made myself a few pitot, and bounced from vegan conversation to vegan conversation - most of them initiated by somebody overhearing the tail end of the previous one and inquiring. all of it was amicable and i think i got some people to think a bit differently about it.

...

i caught a bus to the mall to meet up with gd and mr smear, who'd been forced to wait in a freezing reception for more than three hours for the eye specialist. tomorrow we're going to start hunting for a new one, and then call up the fat-fuck receptionist and tell her we're cancelling because she's a selfish piece of trash (gd described to me in detail how disrespectful she was towards everyone, and that she wasn't the only one to beg her to raise the temperature).

apparently mr smear's eyesight has improved? hmm...

we bussed home, gd prepared a gluten-free vegan pesto and avo pizza (which was delicious), and we discussed mr smear's day camp experience and explained that there's no refunds and he's just going to have to make the most of it. fortunately, as much as he's disappointed that there's so much physical activity, it overall seems like a pretty good place for him to be. he's learning interesting things (just not as much of the day as he'd like), including woodwork (which he is enjoying), and apparently the kids are generally pretty cool.

i'm tired. i really, really hope i get some sleep tonight again.

subversion

 i've just gotten up after a night with almost no sleep, my usual hip flexor discomfort has been amplified severely and i was unable to stretch it out.

the first thing i saw on my phone was a notification to say that my shared ride has started, and as frustrating (and expensive for no reason) as it is to realize that i forgot to cancel my booking for this evening, it's even more frustrating to learn that my booking was captured incorrectly. now i have to wait an hour to call them and try to get them to cancel it without charge...

yesterday was bizarre. i arrived at the office, walked around setting the air conditioners to a reasonable temperature, and then found a phone booth for my meeting with the guy who'd stood me up the previous afternoon. we spent the following two hours together tweaking things and running things, and my very clear takeaway was that anyone who wants to touch their systems needs to do a full team onboarding.

also, i was totally freezing in the phone booth, and it wasn't until i returned to my seat that i remembered that i'd brought a sweater to work 🤦‍♂️

my meeting with the client: before i went up, i commented to the guy next to me that i might well be on my way out. that was the vibe i felt when i sat down across from the client, and it lasted a couple of sentences. and then everything was on its head, as he explained to me what the past half a year has been about from a leadership / business perspective and how me and my team fit in, and what changes are incoming, and how perfectly aligned my team's new mandate is with my personal roadmap.

then we closed out with a pleasant, interesting conversation about the misaligned between architecture and organizational structure and what we could or should be doing.

then i walked out with the strange sensation that either we're exceptionally well-aligned, or i'm being pranked.

i went out to pick up lunch, and ate with the guy who sits next to me, and then grabbed another booth to have a meeting with my manager. it was a different conversation, but not that different. whereas the client had been unsurprised by some of my suggestions, some of them clearly caught my manager off-guard and that was validating.

as much as i hated having to put together and deliver monday's presentation, i learned a whole lot of really important stuff while doing so and it's completely changed the trajectory of my week and how i think about things.

i spent some more time trying to make an AI agent implement metrics responsibly, then came home. i took mr smear out for a short walk, and to draw cash and pick up beers for the evening. on the way i told him all about my day, and when i got to the end he let me know that he hadn't been paying attention and had no idea what i'd said to him. then he told me a story, and when he was done i asked him to repeat it because i hadn't been paying attention. i don't know if he really cared enough to get the message :/

i walked over to my ride's apartment, and away we went to hod hasharon.

half the evening was lovely, half of it was awkward. i had some really interesting, some even productive, conversations. i met some fascinating people. the vegan food only arrived at around 10.30pm, by which stage i didn't care any more. i went deep discussing the second lebanon war, i encountered an older soldier whose sister reminded me that my bnei akiva shevet was emunah. i didn't bother a couple of celebrity heroes of mine, though i did truly want to.

on the way back, i grilled my ride for his aliyah story and was blown away by how different it was from all the other mixed couple stories i've heard. i guess the law doesn't apply equally when you're rich and influential...

i showered, had a cup of tea, wound down and went to bed. i've just got my rental charges cancelled - thankfully - and i've finished my first coffee, and i'm not sure what this morning's going to bring. i'm feeling particularly proud of myself for having thought to shut mr smear's blinds when i got in last night; it's mighty peaceful this morning :P

trepidation

prior to leaving the apartment, we wanted to record a video for my freshly octogenarian cousin. this ended up in drama because mr smear and i had had a misunderstanding about screentime...

...

my mentor didn't get back to me until the evening, and i couldn't not say anything. after getting to the office, i spent an hour or so preparing a message for my client and manager, and ran it past my mother as a sanity check, and fired it off.

it wasn't until the middle of the night that i got a response, which was my client politely thanking me for my input and scheduling a face-to-face. so today's gonna be interesting.

because i'm generally bored, i got a phone call from my wife to inform me that my son, at the public toilets at the mall, had managed to drop his phone into the urinal. and because that wasn't enough, he'd decided to wash it thoroughly with soap and water 🤦‍♂️

then later she called again to inform me that she'd shorted the kitchen circuit by trying to "fix" the toaster while it was still plugged in. FML

for my afternoon meeting, i sat down in the phone booth and waited a few minutes for the guy to show up... he didn't. but while i was there anyway, and i didn't have a heck of a lot of productive stuff to do anyway, i randomly revisited a project i worked on a couple of months ago and got to work fixing memory leaks. i was so excited about doing something constructive that i ended up leaving the office much later than i'd planned...

during that time - after i'd returned to my desk, at least - two weird things happened. i missed the beginning of the first, so i have no idea if this literally happened or if everyone was in on some big joke: apparently one of the guys i've been working with pooped himself? and had to pick it up off the floor? or maybe they were kidding and a dog had left him a present? i don't know. it was very strange, and after i asked (and was told it actually was him) i felt really stupid for asking.

the second, i heard that another guy i've been working closely with just got fired. i hope that's not true.

the third, my client paying our section a visit. after my message. at no point did he attempt to converse with me, but he wasn't unfriendly when i walked past him and said hi, so 🤷‍♂️

...

mr smear was an asshole to me when i got home, which on top of everything else really sucked.

i spoke to my mentor, who used much more colorful language than me when i described the level of idiocy i'm dealing with.

over dinner, we watched half of fern gully, which is good, but upsetting to gd...

after mr smear's shower we had a massive fight over him being rude, but we did have a good conversation afterwards and bedtime was pleasant enough.

i went to bed a little earlier than usual, and i slept alright.

mr smear and i both woke up too early this morning. after reading and resting and stretching, i hunted down the old phones and began the friction-filled process of switching him back to his previous phone. also, learned that rescuing a phone with rice is an absolutely useless old wives' tale.

...

i'm trying to solve a big organizational problem in my head before my meeting with my client. my world is mad.

politely backwards

 today was f***ed. it began alright - i slept okay, had a peaceful morning, and got to the office in good spirits in spite of my trepidation regarding the weirdness i experienced yesterday before leaving.

i spent some time arranging to go to a game dev convention in a couple of weeks, which i'm excited about, and then dived back in to troubleshooting. then i received a concerning message from one of the data guys, and i headed over for what turned into a kind of intervention.

...

i've been talking with these guys about what i'm working on for over a month now. i asked them for help, they basically told me to get on with it. i've worked hard - the heaviest lifting being constant fighting to make sense of how everything works, with AI helping but also hindering at the same time - and it's been rough. demoralizing. and i've been under big pressure.

but hey, i've gotten the work done. i've sent them tons of code to review, and they've (allegedly) reviewed it, and were satisfied enough with it to merge it. now they're saying that everything about my approach has been wrong from the get-go, and that these are highly sensitive systems, and that outsiders really shouldn't be working on them directly.

setting aside the surreal moment wherein the second guy made it all about "blame" and "shaming"*, i'm stunned by just how farcical it all is. to their credit, they both made an effort to behave professionally and tactfully after having thoroughly screwed me over.

* i seem to have successfully diffused the situation by explaining that if anyone was being shamed it was me.

then the third guy came in, and informed me that the reprieve i've been enjoying due to their unresolved issues might be turning into something else entirely. at this point i'm not sure whether this means that my work has been rendered irrelevant, or whether that speeds up my time-to-extended-deadline right into the past...

...

i kept my cool, but immediately left to come home for lunch, with a deep desire to yell my frustrations at the sky. i tried discussing what had happened with my mom on the way, and we both ended up irritated because she couldn't hear me and i didn't know she couldn't hear me. i arrived home to find my son standing at the entrance on his phone, having just arrived from the early ending of the last day of school.

he welcomed me home and informed me that he and "everyone else" had literally thrown all their books into the trash, which distracted me from my own nonsense and drove me totally nuts in a different way. i was gobsmacked.

we went over his end of year report while i ate lunch, and it was relatively good. the fact that he didn't get kicked out of the school, and that he appears to be welcome to continue in the next year, is simply amazing to us and we're very grateful.

omg he's going to be turning eleven soon.

i delayed returning to the office, going so far as to shave my beard before i went, and once there i spent the following two hours writing up reports of what had transpired and compiling a timeline, interspersed with strolling around the office and staring out windows or at the views from the balconies.

i came home, helped unpack the first round of groceries, then took mr smear for a short walk. then i did not-a-hell-of-a-lot until dinner. we had a nice dinner, finished watching zootopia 2 (we were entertained, but i don't like it), spoke to my mom, and mr smear has just convinced me to let him have screen time before late summer holidays bed time.

fine.

entangled

i posted something this morning, and i'm disappointed that it hasn't got much attention:

nobody's talking about something that's really important: regardless of whether you've been retrenched or not, how do you trust an employer that would throw your fellow employees under the bus for the promise of cost cutting AI? how do you return to working for a company that did that to you? where's the incentive to work hard and behave as if you and your employers have a shared stake in the future of your company?

the accepted behavior of our industry leaders is nothing short of psychopathic, and nobody is calling them to account.  we've all just accepted that this is what business looks like now, and it's hurting not just the human beings who do the work and have families to provide for, but also the businesses themselves, and also our economies.

...

the pharmacy run was stressful. after waiting about half an hour, listening to music and knowing there were another ten numbers to go, i was suddenly yanked out of my reverie as i registered that my number was suddenly, unexpectedly up. i rushed to the counter, struggling to turn the music off (the button just didn't work) and get my paperwork out, only to find myself standing there waiting for someone who turned out to be a technician and not a pharmacist.

he was trying to fix the queue number system.

what followed was chaos, with a couple of us keeping track of the numbers because nobody - including the pharmacists - understand what was happening. as my meeting time got closer, i was approached by a woman who was also in a hurry and wanted to trade numbers.

anyway, that wasn't the worst of it. the worst of it was my credit card being declined, and having to set up gd's on my phone wallet with her validating it from her phone while the pharmacist became impatient and a large crowd was suddenly behind me. i managed to get it done in record time, but not without a high level of stress.

i managed to catch a bus and get home and join the zoom call one minute late.

...

after the daily, i ate a quick breakfast and headed to the office. it was a complicated day, with me untangling a mess of work that needed to be reverted, then replayed. i thought i'd done a good job of it, but around 5pm i learned that one of the reverts broke the CI pipeline and nobody (least of all me) could figure out how 🤦‍♂️

at least my sync with my mentor went positively, although a bit later my fellow contractor paid me a visit, distressed, because everyone he's spoken to about the hackathon has given him a different answer and none of them seem fair or right to him. i gave him some advice, but i'm glad i'm not in that position.

during the day it crossed my mind that there's a huge difference between standing on the balcony of a top floor of a very tall tower, and seeing a photo from it, so i walked home, picked up mr smear and walked back to the office to give him a tour of the four corners of our floor. he was thrilled, and it became a powerful lesson in perspective ^_^

we sat down to dinner soon after getting home, and watched the second third of little shop of horrors, which to my delight he's thoroughly enjoying and is completely invested. i must admit, though, i'm finding it more and more amusing that he often pauses to describe what's happening as if he's just had some deep insight or epiphany; like, he's just stopped us to demonstrate, unwittingly, that he understood what just happened on the screen 🤣

 ...

mozambicans: suffered the highest recent casualties, with at least five citizens killed during violent mob attacks and arson in coastal towns, displacing nearly 600 people.

malawians: hundreds forced from their homes, seeking emergency refuge in community halls and mosques while awaiting state-sponsored evacuation.

ghanaians: hundreds voluntarily repatriating via state-chartered flights out of johannesburg due to severe harassment and safety fears.

zimbabweans: facing intense harassment, unlawful evictions, and workplace discrimination as one of the largest migrant populations.

nigerians: dozens requesting emergency flights home, prompting government airlifts and formal diplomatic interventions.

somalians: small business and shop owners facing widespread looting, vandalism, and economic displacement.

congolese: refugees and asylum seekers experiencing systematic exclusion from public healthcare and targeted harassment.

if this is what's happening to black africans right now, it's not going to be long before it starts happening to white africans. and in the current political climate, it's probably going to begin with the jews :(

...

after saying goodnight to my mom, i discussed my fears with gd, which led to a conversation about how she's been handling the years since october 7th and her relationship with the news. along with everything else, i'm glad she's starting to feel a bit of relief and see the light as other nations begin to wake up to what's been going on under their noses all this time.

disappointment 2: the next level

 yesterday was fucking hard. i'm so over it right now, over everything to do with parenting and adulting and just getting through a friday fucking morning without having a breakdown.

yesterday continued to be shit. i didn't mention that i woke up yesterday feeling inspired, because i finally figured out the solution to a technical problem that's been causing me no end of consternation over the course of the past couple of weeks: i figured out what we need to gain visibility into our AI usage in general, not just eavesdropping on whatever our technological overlords haven't figured out how to block yet.

but that inspiration quickly faded with mr smear's friend's phone call*, and then i arrived at the office to discover that the previous day's incident was far from over. instead of working on my project - the one i'm past deadline for and drowning in - i spent all day (minus a break for lunch, thank god i took the opportunity to come home for a break) and until 10.30pm grasping at straws in the dark.

* later i'd get a phone call from his teacher, and learn that the situation is worse than we thought. so there's that.

at least i wasn't alone - and, in particular, at least the boss was involved. both because he had a lot of insights and provided a lot of useful guidance, and because he was a witness to why i wasn't working on my own stuff.

having said that, there i was, at night, in a dark client's office because the building's lights went off, instead of being with my family on a day that i really needed to be having a talk with my son. i'm a contractor, i shouldn't be effectively on-call, and i don't know how to navigate this professionally.

i almost sent a message to my mentor now, but i think it can wait until sunday.

as we left the building, the boss asked if i'd enjoyed the experience. the honest answer was that as much as i like the people, and i learned stuff, and i felt useful, and i'm grateful to have a job that pays me a salary, i also really, really don't want to be working long hours on meaningless stuff i don't give a shit about. he put me on the spot, though, and all i could come up with was "it's not all negative with you guys" and an awkward smile.

i arrived home exhausted and unhappy. i initially thought that my "liquid dinner" of a corona (that's the piss-water everyone else was drinking) would be enough, but then i found the sushi gd had left in the fridge.

my family was fast asleep, and i ate and showered and brushed my teeth feeling like a ghost in my own home.

i climbed into bed and fell asleep pretty quickly, and - for the nth day in a row - was woken at 6am by the god-awful sounds of my son spitting out toothpaste. so i woke up pissed off at him and the world in general, and try as i might (for more than an hour) i just couldn't get back to sleep.

we had our talk, albeit a short one, and sent him off to school. when i finally sat down at the computer to take care of what needs taking care of before we leave for the weekend shopping, i ended up having to troubleshoot the network issues again. i really, really shouldn't have returned the network device. when i finally got it all working again, i received an email reminding me that our physio insurance isn't ponying up, and now i'm pissed off and have sent an email to the brokers to ask if there are other companies we can use.

i'm so over these assholes making me work after i've paid them for a service.

...

i'm physically tired, and emotionally drained, and i don't know how i'm going to do the things i have to do today when i don't even have it in me to do the things i want to do.

not according to plan

 so! i have an explanation for yesterday evening, last night, and this morning. also, today, and still now to a degree.

i didn't mention that when i took mr smear out yesterday, my belly was doing a bit of aching. i didn't really think much on it, but in retrospect that was the warning sign. then last night's feeling horrible, and this morning still feeling horrible, primarily with a low-intensity headache and an unusual dizziness.

i was still in post-rollerblade "recovery" mode, and i grabbed a petit beurre from the jar on my way to my desk. i'd had a few yesterday; they don't always have them, but every now and again i help myself to a couple when they do. but yesterday, and today, it tasted a bit different... richer... and while i managed to put that aside yesterday, the way i was feeling today made me suddenly paranoid. enough to go back and look again, more carefully, and realize that unlike the standard petit beurre in israel (osem), this was a different brand. so i looked up the brand's ingredients.

dairy.

in the "vegan"-labelled cookie jar, looking almost identical to the osem one which is legitimately vegan.

so i had my answer - the tale of last night, in its entirety, was me eating a handful of dairy biscuits yesterday afternoon, and then feeling extremely heavy effects all through the night and most of the morning. then there was an hour or so's reprieve, before this morning's biscuit kicked in and set off a pounding headache.

a coworker gave me a couple of headache tablets, which eventually took the edge off but never quite managed to lift the fog.

...

with that all happening, i had some important project work to do today. it took me a while to get into it properly - i had to deal with a few bureaucratic distractions, and i wasn't exactly operating at peak performance - and by the time i got started i was fortunate to realize that some else had overwritten my work yesterday before i triggered a mistake i might not have been able to take back.

i got in touch, and coached him through merge my changes into his (it's quite frustrating to have to guide experienced, intelligent developers through basic git manipulations because they refuse to use graph visualizations), and eventually we managed to get everything in sync.

but by that stage, i'd already been dragged into an investigation for an incident that had begun the night before and hadn't rung any alarm bells. suddenly, me the contractor who's working on a high-pressured over-deadline damage control project, had to take charge of the situation and lead the team through hours of resolution and troubleshooting.

so much for wednesday.

it looks like we did it in the end, and relatively well (i argued for combining mitigation with some elementary protections for the next set of surprises), and while monitoring the fixes not only fixed up the dashboards, but exported them to a versioned repo and demonstrated the advantage (apparently convincingly) to the others.

...

i left the office really late, stopped at the shops to pick up a couple of things, including soy milk for gd. you see, we found out months ago that she's probably celiac, and had some amazing success with her going gluten-free, but recently some of the symptoms have been creeping back. turns out, she's been drinking oat milk this whole time, thinking that it was gluten-free 🙄

...

dinner was excellent - gd made another large round of sushi and we ate the lot - and we watched some more of cool runnings. the evening was feeling like it was going great, so it was a rather undigestible surprise when the mother of one of mr smear's "friends" called to discuss him getting violent with her boy.

gd had suspected something had happened when he'd come home this afternoon, and he'd brushed her off, and it took a lot for us to extract even a little bit of the story from him. when i called the mother back to talk about it, it turned out that there was more to the story, but mr smear swears blind that that was everything. gd and i are extremely concerned, and we're both having trouble dealing with this.

...

oh, yeah - and this morning's AI usage, which was really basic, blew through more than half of my monthly budget. well, i've been complaining about the AI providers putting on the squeeze for a while now...

so all-in-all it's been a bit of a shit day, with only the slightest sprinkling of glitter over the incident resolution and the few minutes where i got to enjoy dinner with my family before everything fell apart for real.

i'm - fucking - tired.

mental

i just stopped working (11pm), after 30-50 minutes of going around in circles with the AI, in continuation of what the rest of the past two workdays have all been about.

...

for all my vibe-coding friends: a rare moment of AI honesty. this was after a good half hour trying to upgrade my agentic skills so that it could get to the solution without me doing any manual edits of the code.

babysitting AI agents is exhausting.

...

 what a fucking day. i went to the office, chatting with dod about an ambitious new project of his (and trading some wild family stories). the next few hours were me chasing after code reviews and, of course, discovering after they'd been merged that their respective CI pipelines had been broken for a long time and nobody else noticed or cared.

i also spent about an hour doing one of the teams a favor by cleaning up the permissions in their repo, which entailed removing a whole lot of names of people who were retrenched last year. leaving some projects with exactly zero people receiving alerts or able to manually intervene. the irony, that they thought they'd be saving themselves money by firing all those poor people when what they really needed to do was invest in training them better.

between the lack of tea varieties and decaf coffee, and the appalling state of the bathrooms, and the fact that i had an employer team meeting in the afternoon, i packed up around lunchtime and came home to eat. after lunch, i realized that i still hadn't gotten any response from the water company's whatsapp, so i gave them a call.

what i discovered was as follows: there *was* a personal warning sent to us, because we used more water these past couple of months than the previous tenants used last year. even the support agent acknowledged that that's obviously irrelevant and not an indication of a leak. there was *also* a warning sent to each and every apartment in the building, warning us about higher usage because big data refilled the shared reservoir last week. but there's nothing in the email to suggest that it's referring to the shared property.

assholes.

the meeting was long and difficult to get through - precisely the kind of experience that makes me think i might be suffering from some kind of narcolepsy. it's boredom, for sure. i've developed a sensitivity to meetings, and to boring meetings in particular.

while i was having my brain melted, gd discovered where i'd temporarily put some of our pictures a while ago. with her toenail. now that she's had both of her big toenails fucked up, i'm grateful that it's not the one that's still recovering from surgery but my gods, she really lost it. it's was almost her "broken shoelace", after an insane combination of hard things she's (and we've) been going through for the last very long time :(

work-wise, today was long hours, making progress but slowly and painfully. dinner was a nice break - we started watching cool runnings, and i decided that if there ever was an israeli bobsled team it would need to be called slalom aleichem, and then i found out that this year there was an israeli bobsled team, and they gave themselves the amazing name of shul runnings, but then they totally humiliated us by trying to cheat and getting disqualified 😭

after saying good night to my mom, my sister called for a quick sync (she and her son are experiencing moving troubles), and then it was time to put mr smear to bed, and then... AI sisyphus time.

it's late, i think i need to turn my brain off now.