momentum

 whatever else is going on, i woke up feeling better this morning. i started my day reading akira, the artwork is stunning and the story is... a bit different from what i remember from the movie, but i haven't seen the movie in forever so...

i began my functional day ordering hand-vacuum filters off of ali express, and unboxing the reflective straps i picked up yesterday. we found our sharpies, but then i discovered that sharpies and white-out don't mix, and then gd realized that she could mix up acrylic paint and did an excellent job of color-matching on our bathroom tiles 👍

[pausing to go and watch gd eating sunflower seeds, i was honestly convinced that she was somehow doing it wrong and now i'm trying to figure out how i've never seen her eating them before]

i walked to work a little anxiously, expecting another cyclist/motorcyclist incident in the walkway and identifying more with the poor old guy who was so angry about it a couple of weeks ago.

there were no signs, nothing indicating that there was a problem with the road i normally cross to get into the office, and i splashed down into what was either mud, or cement, and it went into my sandals.

i - was - pissed.

i tried not to track whatever it was into the office, which was nigh impossible, and found myself awkwardly and embarrassingly standing on a bunch of paper towels while washing my sandals off in the bathroom sink. not the greatest start to the workday.

work itself was fine, though. i made progress, and am feeling a bit of momentum, i had a pleasant roadmap meeting with my mentor, lunch was good (my onboarding buddy and i had a long chat about the differences in professional culture and work/life balance between the big companies), and i'm feeling pretty solid about my dev setup and the task i'm doing.

oh, and i had coffee with my old friend from the officer's course, and learned that's he's doing really cool hobbyist stuff with home automation and 3D printing. like, really cool stuff.

...

i received a call from the medical cannabis people, apparently there isn't an issue with gd getting a larger quantity per month. i really, really hope that's true 🤞

...

it sucked that the air conditioner guy couldn't make it this afternoon - or tomorrow, either - but it did give me the opportunity to go and hear eli sharabi speak. holy shit, that was an intense hour and a half. the fact that he's doing what he's doing and is maintaining the attitude that he's maintaining is nothing short of miraculous. there's no detail of his story that isn't devastating and heartbreaking.

...

i came home in time for dinner, and after discussing what i'd heard we dived in to another episode of evangelion. mr smear actually ate most of the chili, i didn't cry when i took too much carolina reaper sauce, and then it was shower / teeth / bedtime and i read a bit more of the light fantastic.

i couldn't figure out how i was feeling and i certainly wasn't being focused, so gd and i watched another episode of fauda, and i think i'm going to try for a (relatively) early night.

adventures in uncertainty

 what a weird day. the only times i went outside were to pick up reflective straps i'd ordered online (i haven't even opened the packages yet) and to take out the trash. the sky dripped a few drops on me along the way, but otherwise my time outside was uneventful and insufficient to constitute exercise.

from a health and wellness point of view, i'm not okay. i'm convinced that it's psychological, and that i'm just burned out and depressed.

...

i finished the first evangelion book this morning, and it is magnificent. or... manganificent?

i came across this at the library, and excitedly brought it home - only halfway through did i fully register that it's an adaptation of the series, not the other way around, but it's an adaptation with so much heart and soul!

all the little shifts really pull the series' threads more tightly together and make it not just emotionally powerful, but much more intellectually accessible. i recommend watching the original series first, but either way this is a fantastic book.

we watched the third episode over dinner, it was awesome.

...

i worked from home today, and i sat too long in my office chair. which i'm still sitting too long in, i guess. i'd to say i worked hard, but that expression's been slowly losing all meaning over the course of the year. we had an interesting online group meeting with my employer this afternoon, and one of the questions was "what do you do between prompts?".

well, i had an answer, but it depends on the kind of work i'm doing. for personal stuff, i'm usually messing with other projects while waiting for the response, so i cycle between them. for paid stuff, i'm usually either upgrading my "software factory", as one of my group put it, by improving my skills and refining my tooling setup, or i'm reading through the previous round's changes to get "closer to the source".

i went through a lot of that, today.

on a silly note, i misheard one of the group as we were all saying goodbye, and felt obliged to produce the following:

...

mr smear seems to have had a good day. fortunately or unfortunately, gd came to me today with the book report on maus he's been working on, and it said some disturbing things about the holocaust. so when he got home, we sat down to talk about it... he explained himself pretty well, and we're not alarmed any more, but in addition to coaching him on the language he uses to describe things (he "got it" pretty quickly), we're now planning a family trip to yad vashem. considering the fictional darkness he's already been exposed to i think he'll be able to handle it, and we want him to see and feel the reality and the human faces behind the numbers and clinical grim details.

...

i spent a lot of time thinking about investments today, i'm nervous about having all of our deposit money in indexes that may or may not crash. i've learned enough about investment and economics to be well into the valley of despair, so i don't trust any advice or theories on the internet but both sides make compelling arguments.

after thinking out loud and talking through a plan with my mom and gd after dinner, i decided to pull a chunk of money out of the traditional indexes, put some of it into an israel fund that includes real estate, and withdraw the rest to my bank account... in another few days i'm going to go in person to try and put that money away (along with the bonus i received) in a way that makes sense.

...

gd and i seem to be okay, but i'm still having moments of disconnection, still processing my feelings about the other night.

...

i've spent the past couple of hours working on security for one project and blockchain architecture for another, and it's approaching midnight already. i think i'm ready to call it a day.

i feel sick

 i have no idea whether i'm sick or not, but i feel sick. weak. i'm probably not sick, though, and just feeling the effects of what's definitely and understandable depression. the following are my prime suspects for how i'm feeling at the moment:

1. the stress and adrenaline dump of last night's fight.

2. the financial distress combined with the general stress of all the things broken and wrong in this apartment (gd discovered this afternoon that the floor's lifting by the balcony door) and the fact that the landlord's barely communicating.

3. not eating well. i mean, i think i'm eating good quality food, but i'm not sure i'm eating enough and i'm struggling to control what i eat because i'm trying to lose a little weight. weight watching is complicated :/

having said all that, although getting to the beach and back on my rollerblades was proper exercise in significant heat and humidity, i felt fine at the beach with nystire and co and a friend we served with and his kids, and although some of the news was really heavy it was good seeing them and i had a good time.

...

i went to bed about an hour after my last post, and woke up about six hours later. i didn't feel particularly positive about the world, and i'm still processing some of things said and done last night. relationships are weird.

mr smear surprised me, though: his phone was ringing so i took it to him, apparently waking him up with a call from his friend. he answered, jumped out of bed, and quickly (much more quickly than we're used to) brushed his teeth (and presumably performed his ablutions), got dressed, packed his bag, and all i had to do was help him pack a chunk of the challah-peño into a tupperware container and accompany him to his friend's just in case he got lost.

it was a perfect opportunity to gauge how much last night fucked him up - he seems fine, we had a very reasonable conversation and then moved on - and just generally talk about the world. the day was already heating up, so i took a roundabout route home which was shadier, going through the museum park and then park hayarkon, and that gave me a little processing time too.

after burning tokens for a while, gd and i watched a few episodes of fauda, which were very stressful, and then i headed to the beach.

i got home a little bit before mr smear did: he'd been worried about coming home by himself, but not because he was afraid of getting lost. apparently - though she denies it - he saw a video with gd of a kid being kidnapped in tel aviv in broad daylight, so we've explained that he's clearly mistaken, and that he needs to always be careful, but never scared.

once he was out the shower we had a little time to play through his horror game, which is taking shape nicely, and then we ate dinner and watched another touching episode of the wonder years (harper's wood). my gods, that series is amazing.

we talked to my mom, who relieved us with news of shadowslight's dad who's just come out of surgery for an aneurysm and seems to be doing okay. i asked for financial advice, specifically regarding how much money (and time) i'm investing in all these AI projects. i wish i had some kind of indication as to whether the things i'm doing are potentially lucrative or a waste of time 🙄

it's very hard to think straight when you're under pressure, and that's exactly when you need to be able to do so the most.

broken plates

 i don't know which was more effective in waking me up, the extra coffee or having to confront the cleaning lady upstairs after she threw dirty soap water onto our balcony again.

i finally made some progress on my projects before mr smear came home from school, and then we all headed out to the mall to look for a halloween mask for him. and also a tri-phase wall socket for the borrowed electric stove, which of course the mall hardware center doesn't stock. we spent considerably more money on his costume than i'm comfortable with, and that's after i told gd that i'm debating with myself whether the current AI subscription is really worth it or not (i think i'm going to downgrade, but i've got mixed feelings about it).

i felt downright ill by the time we eventually got home, and after eating something in the hope it would make me feel better, i napped on the living room carpet (and a beanbag) for what must have been about 45 minutes. i did feel a bit better after.

the highlight of the evening came after kneading the challah-peño: i sat mr smear down and we watched the first couple of episodes of evangelion together. it was awesome ^_^

dinner was nice, gd was very proud of her polenta and tomato pesto sauce and it went surprisingly well with the challah-peño and avocado (we call it "soggy pizza" now). we had a long chat with my mom while we ate, and we were planning on watching a movie together afterwards.

we never watched anything. the past few hours were absolutely miserable, unhinged, and were damned near the end of me and gd. i think we're (somewhat) okay now, but we're all feeling traumatized, exhausted, and disconnected.

...

at least the games are coming along nicely...

catching flies

 it's funny, i seem to be sleeping okay this week, but i'm tiiiiiired. mentally exhausted. emotionally drained.

i really don't want to - and can't afford to - miss the opportunity to build more, write more, find ways out of the financial hole and create the stuff that i'm excited about. but this morning? and yesterday morning? ugh. it's a brain-fog, probably depression, and i can't even focus for long on reading evangelion (which i'm absolutely loving, not least because its producer notes very explicitly answer All The Questions).

maybe i should go a little harder on the caffeine today. fight it. push through it.

*yawns in sad and lazy*

maybe shinji's attitude is infecting me. i guess i'm pretty susceptible to something like that right now.

undo not disturb

gd's phone tends to beep all night, which disturbs me but not her. so a few days ago i set up do not disturb on her phone, with exceptions for when anyone calls more than once during a short period.

i noticed that this didn't really stop the notifications, but whatever. tonight, though, it made big drama - gd was waiting for a delivery of something, and her phone never rang. it's clear from the suppressed notifications that it *should* have rung.

fucking samsung.

so now she's pissed, but also terrified that she'll be blacklisted for putting a delivery person through this :(

...

i wasn't sleeping well, but now i'm not sleeping at all. and my head's still aching.

the first day of fall

 things that upset me in the middle of the night: looking at my phone's notifications, and then finding myself scrolling on instagram, and coming across these two self-hating jews discussing the ugliness of a rigged system that is everything anti-capitalists claim capitalism is: the opposite of a free market.

...

i'm regretting taking a puff before bed last night, partially because i'm feeling totally exhausted right now and it's almost 8pm and i'm drinking a fourth cup of coffee in order to be able to go rollerblading, partially because i passed in and out of conciousness earlier while listening to my new client's all-hands and i realized at some point that i'm not breathing with my whole lungs and when i do, it feels... smoky. like, tight and sticky.

i hope i don't regret this coffee.

mr smear surprised us by getting up and being ready on time for school, and then away he went. i took care of a bunch of first-of-the-month admin, and then suddenly it was time to go to work.

overall, i'm really impressed. the offices feel good, everyone i met seems relaxed and organized, even though they all described the work as anything but. during my first daily with the team mr smear called me, twice, while i was introducing myself - turned out he was worried that he couldn't find his meds, when he finished taking them yesterday already 🙄

i spent most of my day setting up my new machine and accounts and beginning the onboarding process, and talking to people, and i was *really* surprised to learn that my client offers catered lunches that include vegan options that are pretty darned good.

in the all-hands, i was literally amazed to hear them discussion employee retention and training, and making their approach very clear, and their approach is stellar. to go from a company continually laying off good workers to one making a point of developing theirs is quite a relief!

i guess mr smear and i shouldn't have eaten when i got home, because we also ate at dinner time and we both stuffed ourselves on gd's sushi while watching an episode of the simpsons that irritated me because its premise revolved around everyone in town being a total moron.

yes, yes, i know.

anyway, here we are. mr smear apparently had a great day at school, i'm going to at least try to go rollerblading tonight, and gd seems to be doing alright herself, so... 🤷‍♂️

achievements unlocked

 alright! we had fun last night, yohay sponder's show was brilliant (even though it was very different to the one i went to with the same name), gd had a good time, we both laughed hysterically many times, and then we returned home to find mr smear also in good spirits, having spent the previous couple of hours playing video games without his parents to bother him :P

i don't recall what i did between getting home and getting into bed (aside from showering, brushing my teeth and spending half an hour on the spec library i've been working on for the last few days), but i ended up going to bed around midnight after taking a puff.

i slept pretty well.

i woke up earlier than i would have liked this morning, started my day with my morning ritual which included reading more of doomsday clock on the balcony, but relatively quickly arriving at the conclusion that i really don't want to read any more of it.

i really want to like this. the artwork is superb, and there's clearly a will to do something interesting, but the result is an incoherent mess and i just cared less and less as the panels wore on. this feels stuck somewhere between a cash-grab and an attempt to recreate something that was truly groundbreaking but without offering anything new.

instead, i spent the next couple of hours working on the spec library, then we all walked to the book / stationery store to buy what mr smear was missing for next week, and to the cobbler to pick up my sandals (expensive, but he did a great job), and then we took a bus to fox to learn that nobody stocks shorts in my size this late in the season (it's still mid-summer), and then another to dizengoff center, stopping along the way to eat really good hummus.

most of that story took place under a bit of a cloud because mr smear was being shitty, but by the time we sat down to eat things were fine. so lunch was great (except for the bit where i unwittingly dipped pita bread into gd's hummus, completely forgetting her need for sterile gluten-free environments, and then had to scrape out anything that might've made contact and hope for the best... so far, she seems fine.

*phew*

we found no shorts in my size at the mall, or nothing that i'd be interested in wearing, at any rate, but we did pick up mr smear's new glasses, so it wasn't a waste of time.

we came home, immediately began preparing the challahpeño, and i dived back into the spec library. within the three hours that i spent on it before leaving for shul, i achieved the following:

1. completing the main work, and figuring out how to interact with it.

2. testing it out on my other game project, very successfully!

3. writing up most of the article that i'll publish along with it.

i fired off some screenshots to dx, and he's excited too ^_^

i took mr smear to shul. this evening's service was weirdly short because a lot of stuff was left out, but that was because it was dedicated to the kids going back to school and (apparently) a conversion class graduating. mr smear was generally cool, he handled the babies well, and i was fascinated by the child-like mentally handicapped guy in front of me who's extremely muscle-y, but was so freaking cute as he kept jumping up and down whenever there was singing and his mother had a really hard time explaining to him that he was too big to join the little kids for their little ceremonies.

...

well, here we are, getting ready for kiddush at the end of the summer holidays, the shabbat between having finished strong at my previous client and looking forward to a new client with interesting potential, having completed the exciting work i embarked on at the beginning of the week...

shehecheyanu vekiyimanu vehigiyanu la'zman hazeh

the doing feeling

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

- when to build infrastructure, when to hack

- how to identify and test good ideas

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

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

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

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

...

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

...

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

boding

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

it was pretty hot today.

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

at least the floors are clean, i guess.

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

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

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

a belated hogwart's letter

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

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

...

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

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

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

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

...

tuesday night:

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

yesterday:

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

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

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

...

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

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

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

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

today:

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

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

...

good grief.

so hot outside

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

the unicontext

...

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

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

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

...

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

...

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

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

i'm not going rollerblading tonight.

discombobulated

 today has been ridiculous. i got a (literal) couple of hours' sleep, then dragged myself out of bed to... i don't know what i did*... then rushed out to catch a bus to my mom's bank to sort something out with her account.

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

there was no queue, but no workers either, so the manager called me into his office. when i asked him what he would do, his advice was that it would of better value to us to go home and take care of it ourselves.

the bus driver on the way home / to my office took a wrong turn that sent us in a wide circle around the hospital, in traffic, which was ridiculous. gd handed me a small lunch at the door and i headed to my client, arriving just in time for my team daily.

the day was, well, busy. lots of babysitting AI, literally flipping between contexts like it wasn't hurting my brain. i have spent most of the day consistently switching between four or five different things at a time and trying not to lose my mind.

i currently *am* the orchestrator. i need to level up and outsource that function to AI already.

towards the end of the day, i saw someone start preparing a PR to go in before the golang work that i've been spending weeks on, on a project nobody ever touches, and that i'd finally asked for a review for this morning thinking it was done. i actually panicked, and sent messages both to the author and his manager begging them to make sure my changes went in first.

i'm very grateful that they acquiesced 🙏

i also spent a lot of the day troubleshooting my auto-doc integration. and after walking home and shaving my beard in an attempt to decompress, i dived straight back into it and i'm still going now (on the other machine). so now i'm going to deliberately stop what i'm doing and go play a game with mr smear.

oh! my sister and i were just talking, it looks like she has the exact same lower back / hip flexor thing and she also didn't sleep last night :/

blown fuse

 today was fucking miserable. i spent most of the company hackathon just wanting to be anywhere else, questioning my life choices and feeling very, very shit about myself and the situation i found myself in.

yesterday:

after significantly more effort, i managed to push monday's changes, and then follow that up with more changes. sitting next to the AI experts has become a legitimate challenge, because we have really interesting conversations all the time, and i need to keep awkwardly bowing out to get some actual work done.

i came home for lunch yesterday, gd made me more sushi, and it was a great escape from the office. just as i was preparing to head back, she received a phone call from a very worried mr smear - he admitted that he'd drawn IN MARKER all over the book we'd had to re-purchase for him a couple of months ago. the day before they had to return all the books.

fortunately, we had plenty of time to coordinate our responses, so we could keep on him on edge while figuring out an appropriate punishment that's harsh enough for his being on edge to be warranted, and for him to learn the lesson, of course, while still being fair enough to reward his being honest and upfront about it.

when i was finally able to get home from the office, i dropped my bag and immediately took him to the bookstore to purchase another copy. the walk there and back was long enough to have a bunch of conversations, including follow-up talks about what to do if he gets lost again, and the rest of the evening was another sushi dinner (and starting splash), and random mindless shit until climbing into bed.

today:

i woke up late, which was already a terrible start to the day. and my stomach was doing a thing. i left with mr smear, saying goodbye to him halfway to the school and walking to my office from there. i arrived having not had a cup of coffee yet, so i made one, immediately remembering how much i dislike their coffee options.

there was a large spread for breakfast, but i didn't see any vegan options so i found my team's station and started trying to get set up. of course encountering lots of weird issues that i hadn't had before.

the office manager told me to stop being a nerd (it was her expression for the day) and go eat, so i got up and asked her if there were vegan options. "of course there are", she said, and aimed me at one of the caterers. he walked me around, showing me that a) he didn't understand what "vegan" means and b) that the only options that seemed trustworthy were all buried in cheese. no, i didn't want him to wash them for me. that whole ordeal was worse - more insulting - than them just admitting that there weren't any options.

having started my day thoroughly on the wrong foot, i then began to meet my teammates. two of them were very clear about not wanting to be there, three of them arrived late, apologized, and then promptly fucked off for the rest of the day. that left five of us altogether, with exactly one guy being enthusiastic and two in total being productive (not including myself).

to be fair, though, the lack of productivity in the two guys who weren't interested in the first place was largely due to my lack of planning. it wasn't until a short while before demo time that we had the general architecture locked in, and at that point i learned that i was supposed to have been putting together the presentation and presenting our efforts to ~100 people.

this was a rock bottom moment for me.

there was nothing i felt right about presenting, everything was utter dogshit, after a lousy, miserable day that included navigating some pretty shitty attitudes. i was so stressed that i - only half in jest - tried to get anyone else in the team to take charge, and eventually one of the more experienced guys suggested that i ask the organizers to skip our team.

which they did, but then everyone seemed disappointed, the enthusiastic team member especially so.

most of the demos were really good, but i couldn't enjoy them properly because i was so nervous that they'd forget they agreed to skip us and call me up anyway. by the time i left, i felt absolutely disgusted with myself and with the day, completely demoralized, and full of bitterness.

i called gd and let her know how i was feeling, then i called my mom, and then i tried to get my head into a better place while on the bus home but to no avail. one of our upstairs friends walked into the building with me and made the mistake of asking "how are you?", and then i automatically responded with the truth and immediately felt bad for doing so. i sent her an apology a little while later.

our landlord and his handyman had been sending me voice messages all day, which i detest, and they became more and more confusing and annoying until eventually we spoke (just after i put mr smear to bed), and i went downstairs and discovered that the aircon has been on, and isn't dripping. he said some stuff that confused me, which i'm too tired to care about, and now that gd and i have finished the first episode of ludwig (which is really fun) and i've posted this, i'm going to try to wind down and fuck off into dreamland.

weekend vibes

sleep journal entry:

i had four coffees yesterday. prior to my third coffee, i was falling apart, foggy and tired and sleepy and having trouble concentrating, for at least forty five minutes.

i woke up this morning from a dream in which i was arguing with schwarzenegger's terminator over how to approach an accounting problem.

yesterday:

i had some stuff to do in the morning, but i ended up having a long chat with urchin instead. i feel bad, because i think i made her feel bad about her new corporate employer when i talked about the trust issues in our industry that i previously posted about...

...

on my way into the office i had an idea: i think a lot of what's wrong with western society comes down to having been raised to believe that we can be anything and we can do anything, which, when taken literally, ends up with people who cannot bring themselves to accept and deal with reality. it's a societal illness.

...

the team i sit with was off volunteering, to it was a quiet morning in the office. it was still kinda quiet after they came in, so it was mostly a relaxed end to the week and i seem to have gotten a handle on the current phase of my project.

i came home for lunch, ate a couple of lotus cookies and fired off a troll message to mr smear thanking him and implying that i ate them all. when school ended, i received the following response:

both hilarious and scary - on the one hand, it felt like a "we need to talk about kevin" moment, on the other i was highly amused by his emoji fluency 🤣

we discussed the upcoming exhibit, and he told me he was only missing one piece that got lost a couple of months ago, and i asked him to recreate it when he got home. as much for me and gd as for him.

a while later, i received a picture of his recreation, and it was brilliant ^_^

the office happy hour started less happy because i inadvertently raised the issue of them not having any vegan treats when i, personally, wasn't interested in the temptation. but my boss is also vegan (apparently), so the organizers were quite stressed about it.

i grabbed a beer, and approached one of the AI gurus about my openspec experience (which we'd briefly discussed a couple of months ago), and he offered to sit with me for a bit. we ended up spending most of an hour and a half in a flurry of installations and experiments, and i was pleased to see his enthusiasm when he finally grokked what it is i want to build. i learned a lot from the conversation in general.

i had an awkward interaction with my boss on my way out, he wanted to know my project timeline and i began explaining what i'd already explained to my manager, "assuming no more surprises, and every step along the way we've learned new and surprising things"... and he cut me off: "first the estimate, then the disclaimer" :P

i came home, mr smear and i strapped on our blades, and i took him for a round. he was really nervous and scared, but we got through it and he had some really good moments. we also had two encounters with really sweet dogs; the first, a puppy who was peeing himself constantly with excitement, the second a huge, fluffy, very nosey girl. i very much appreciate the additional positive vibe injection into mr smear's early experiences ^_^

just before we got home, he tried to roll a bit on a downhill and hurt himself as he fell. he was upset and started sulking away, and i caught him and told him he had to show himself he could do it - i'd been telling him the entire ride that his body's capable, it's his brain that needs to be aligned. surprisingly, for the state he was in, he went "fuck it", turned and rolled and t-stopped beautifully!

i was so proud of him, not just for the physical success but for the attitude, and for not ending the ride on a negative note.

we finished watching little shop of horrors over dinner, and got him into bed, and then i sat down with gd and we talked about something that she's always done when we watched tv or movies together that's really unpleasant*. it feels like we got to the bottom of it - it's more a communication thing than anything else - and it was a relief.

* she just fucks off, while we're waiting for her to continue. anyway, it's a little complicated.

i did nothing last night, and went to bed relatively early because my eyelids were feeling particularly heavy.

this morning so far:

i got up late, finished another chapter of watchmen, and finally replaced the UV light and purifier of the tami 4. something went egregiously wrong, though, and now we don't have a tami 4 for the weekend and a technician is (thankfully so quickly) coming in on sunday morning.

now that i've posted this, pausing to tear up at the opening sequence of darwish - desert adventure 2025 (quoting udi kagan's הלם קרב), we're about to leave for the school for the end of year exhibit, very excited to see what mr smear's been up to!

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.

delays

 i kinda feel like i'm in a pinball machine, being smacked around by flippers and bouncing off random objects and trying hard to avoid falling into the hole.

it took me too long to get out the house, so i stayed for my morning meeting and then went to the office, leading a lost stranger i encountered along the way to his destination.

in a nutshell, i basically wasted most of today on fixing up a repository in a way that the owners didn't like, and nobody cares enough to just finish the job. i think i handled the discussion at the end of the day appropriately professionally, though it was clearly awkward for both me and the guying reviewing my code.

in the afternoon, someone reached out to me to inform me that some of my earlier changes had broken something - eight days ago. fortunately, it was already a different kind of broken by someone else 🙄

fixing it was quick and easy, but then something in databricks went wrong and i had to manually reset it, which led to another issue with the other code i'd been working on... eeeeeverything is broken....

last week my rollerblading experience was disrupted because i'd consumed dairy, and i wanted to make up for it. i came home, for some reason stewing over something protoplasm and i had had to deal with in goa many years ago, and when i walked into our apartment my son jumped out and yelled namaste!, which he had no idea what it meant, and then when i'd calmed down a little and we went out for a quick walk before dinner, we encountered two indian women in beautiful traditional dress.

so that all happened.

we started watching little shop of horrors at dinner (mr smear grumbled about it being a musical, but calmed down quickly because it's good), then spoke to my mom, and then waited for mr smear to get ready for bed... by which stage i was running late for the rollerblading, and my stomach was doing a thing, and i decided that tonight's not the right kind of night.

so i've done very little of value, it's already late, i'm going to go to bed now. hopefully tomorrow will be more constructive.

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.

recalculating

 today was a DAY. i managed to get some annoying admin taken care of after mr smear left for school, and sort out an impending price hike from my mobile carrier, and try to help prepare gd for her day ahead with the cigarette bugs.

just before i left the apartment, i pulled the trigger on my PR, knowing that my bulgarian support team was on holiday and praying it wouldn't break anything.

i was still extremely anxious on my way to work, but i got in touch with my mentor and managed - through a bit of blathering - to explain the situation. he, positive as usual, assured me that i'm doing great. he asked if i've verbally abused anyone in the office, or physically abused anyone in the office, and said that as long as neither of those things have happened and that i'm doing my best to operate as professionally as possible, i can stop worrying about my misjudgment hurting my employer's reputation (and therefore my standing with my employer). and that besides, everyone must be fully aware that i'm doing damage control on a system that has been left in utter chaos due to bad management... just like everyone else's.

so that was really comforting, and although i still have leftover anxiety, it's worlds' less than it was.

i came in to find my deployment successful, which was another relief.

then i was asked by one of my client team's how long my contract is for, to which i replied, somewhat evasively, that i don't really know. on the one hand, i'm learning a hell of a lot of what i'm supposed to be learning. and it's a great place to hone my craft with (somewhat) less risk. on the other hand, it's a really toxic situation. although apparently on par for the course, these days.

i discussed yesterday's achievement of disabling all of the garbage that was unknowingly being injected into each and every prompt with a couple of people, two of them heavy, experienced users of AI. not only was i pleasantly surprised by their finding my personal skill-sharing strategy intriguing, but they'd never known about the extra weight either and one of them asked me if i wouldn't mind giving a short talk to the group about it 😅

i spent some time crafting a message asking for help with the new data pipelines, got called in to consult on a language identification problem and was surprised to find myself effectively running the meeting, and then i left the office to return home for lunch, stopping by the supermarket on the way home and finding precisely the kinds of plastic containers i was hoping to pick up for gd, who was apparently up to her elbows in cigarette beetles.

i believe i have a handle on their life cycle, now. it looks like if we manage to, erm, contain the present situation, we should be able to put a proper stop to the next potential generation. unfortunately, gd's had to throw out an enormous amount of very expensive food, which is thoroughly distressing.

i think i may have mentioned that money's a little tight right now...

after lunch, i returned to the office and began redesigning the monitoring dashboard. i would spend most of the next four hours troubleshooting the results, half of that time refining my agents' troubleshooting and self-improvement skills. while the improvements after yesterday's cleanup were palpable, by the final stages i just wanted to tell the AI "don't be an asshole" even though i knew that that probably wouldn't be constructive :/

i also finally delivered that report that had been causing me so much trouble - once the product guy gave me the green light this morning, it took about six hours to run...

i received an unusually helpful answer to my plea for help, from a couple of guys i've worked alongside before. one of them was in the office and introduced me to the two people who can actually help me, who very luckily are also in our office. and now i know that the work i've been planning to do - AI-guided, of course - has been entirely wrong 🤢

once my dashboard was looking good, i made my way home, dropping off my bag and picking up my child (essentially rescuing him from the trauma of experiencing gd freaking out over the nuisance beetles all afternoon) and heading to the container store. we bought a bunch of stuff - it's a little more expensive than the supermarket, and not quite as high quality, but it was a bunch of different shapes that we needed - carried everything back home and then continued on to the supermarket again, picking up a bunch more containers there.

we got home in time for a take-out dinner (gd was in no position or mood to cook), watched casual geographic and learned about gay giraffes, which was awkward.

we chatted with my mom, but mr smear brought the vibe down considerably when he became uncooperative at shower time. then, to make matters worse, he decided he needed to toilet. for almost an hour. it was very late by the time he finally had showered and brushed his teeth and gotten in to bed. i don't have any idea where we're supposed to get the patience from.

it's been a day. i think i'm probably going to go to bed soon. i'm expecting to sleep a bit better, he said out loud and then instantly regretted it.

discouraged

 the more i worked today, the more despairing i felt. i'm extremely anxious and overwhelmed, i feel like i'm drowning. every layer of the onion i peel shows me that the onion was far larger and deeper than i thought; or, at least, each wall that i break down thinking it's the last one turns out to have two more standing right behind it.

it doesn't help me personally that i understand that what this company has done to itself is dangerously stupid: most of the companies in our industry, it seems, have shot themselves in the foot by attempting to drop headcount and fill the gaps with AI. even if we were using the latest models this would be a stretch, but with the model pricing being raised across the board (the drug dealer's sample period is over) and the israeli shekel having strengthened significantly against the dollar (making actual developers more expensive to the company), it's a race to the bottom and everyone's losing.

the only positive thing i managed to do - i'm not holding my breath about the disappointing reports i put together after five additional hours of investigation, or the plans for tomorrow so that i can ask for help - was to disable and migrate all of the thousands of lines of irrelevant and contradictory repository rules and skills that i didn't realize were polluting each and every AI context i've been working with up until now :/

...

gd and i were a little late to the school meeting this morning, because of course we hit ridiculous rush hour traffic and of course we decided to get off and switch to the light rail just as we got through the worst of it. we had a good, productive hour with the councillor and new homeroom teacher, though, some of it was funny and some deeply concerning. the homeroom teacher did a little snooping right after, though, and called me to clarify that the incidents were not quite as serious as they'd been made out to be.

that was an enormous relief.

gd stopped at azrieli by herself on the way home, which was the first time she's felt safe enough (from a health perspective) to do so in many months. i came home and dived into work.

i had a really rough afternoon, and i don't know if my regularly running back-and-forth to the bathroom was the result of something i ate, or the anxiety that was slowly building up.

either way, my first real "break" was after mr smear came home, and we had a very long (an hour or so) family meeting during which we discussed All The Things that had come up during the school meeting. it was mostly positive, but the big stuff is him needing to learn to avoid alienating his peers, and find more ways to connect with them.

oh, yes - mr smear came home sporting a weird rash on his hand. gd and i suspect that it might be from the borrowed wrist protectors, but it didn't seem to be getting any worse so now we think he must have brushed past a bush or something that he had an allergic reaction to.

because we were super-bored, and not stressed about anything, we discovered that in addition to everything else we have an infestation of cigarette beetles - or something very similar :/

by the time we had dinner i didn't have much of an appetite, and neither did gd, though we managed to eat anyway. after a couple of great episodes of infinity train (we're into season 2, now), we chatted with my mom for a while, fortunately discussing her birthday present and not making the mistake of getting her something she doesn't want.

...

we also discussed my cousin who was scammed a while back, and taken for literally everything he had. not only has he just gone from wealthy to destitute, and not only is he seemingly making every effort to not get back on his feet again, but gd made a good point today and now we're all really concerned that he's essentially dragging his son down with him, because nobody else is going to put him up.

it's just awful.

...

i honestly don't know how i'm going to sleep tonight, but i have to. i'm so nervous about all the steps i need to take in the morning, and i feel just horrible about everything.