more than rough

 firstly, i've been so thoroughly exhausted today as to be dysfunctional. to be honest, i can't tell if this is because i didn't sleep last night, or because i'm just through-and-through sick.

in retrospect, i shouldn't have hugged our old neighbor when we bumped into her at the clinic.

oh gods.

after sending mr smear off to school, i accompanied gd to the clinic. the doctor was very understanding, and we booked an appointment with a surgeon. we went home, had a visit from our upstairs neighbor, who amongst other things informed us that they're going to get started working on building a metro station under our building and we're going to need to replace all the doors and windows for soundproofing.

after breakfast, i crashed for a very short nap and tried to get some work done, but was constantly distracted. some of the distraction was about my previous employer; the lead i felt betrayed by has apparently left the company (though he got some of his options), and someone i served with asked me about an opening so i told him what had happened.

then i was time to accompany gd to the surgeon. aside from his poor bedside manner, he didn't convince us that he understood the problem, nor that his solution made sense, so we thanked him and asked the receptionist for advice. she was very kind, and made gd an appointment with the surgeon i had been *hoping* we were going to see.

i'm going to remember his name this time.

so back home we went, i napped again, and got a little work done before we headed out a third time.

the surgeon immediately knew exactly what was going on - there were two possibilities, with the same treatment - and i advised gd to take his offer and get it taken care of immediately rather than wait for it to continue to fester.

we waited for a while, but he eventually arrived. he was clear in his explanations, and made me feel confident; unfortunately, when it came to the procedure itself things went south. the local anaesthetic did not anaesthetic, and i've never heard gd scream like that before. it was painful and nerve-wracking just going through it holding her hand, so i can't imagine what it was like. except that i would probably have fainted very quickly.

he bound up her toe, and sent us on our way. every step was agony, and only got worse as we proceeded towards the street. fortunately, we managed to order a taxi and jump in very quickly, and the toughest walk was getting her from the parking area to the couch.

in retrospect, i don't know how i managed to get any work done before dinner.

gd didn't manage to keep her dinner down, so that unintentionally accelerated her getting her teeth brushed and ready for bed (or rather the couch, i suspect), and fortunately i came up with the idea of wheeling her around in the office chair, which has made all the difference.

as the afternoon and evening have worn on, my nerves have worn thinner and thinner and my throat and my brain are clamoring for bed and threatening to keep me from sleeping again.

and it looks my mom's not doing so great either, health-wise, but at least she got back to cape town safely.

oh! and just prior to gd's procedure, my boss - my actual employer - called to ask me how i'm doing. i asked how he thinks i'm doing, and suggested that we schedule a sync. i hope i'm not in shit...

t-2

 i finished reading moon knight this morning, it is legitimately mind-boggling and brilliant. then mr smear went off to school after we'd had a very serious conversation invoked by the disappearance of the imagine channel - where we got synthknot from - which resulted in me posting the following:

a really amazing youtube channel got taken down, and it's almost guaranteed that it's due to unjust copyright strikes. watching content producers like rick beato fighting off lawfare trolls makes it clear that google/youtube really don't care, and that there're no humans in the loop...

and then my facebook marketplace experience earlier this week, also no humans in the loop...

and all the people who fled toxic twitter to make just-as-toxic mastodons and blueskys...

and china using discord and tiktok to spy on us and brainwash us (effectively)...

and roblox pushing kids into dark corners and actively preventing people from fighting off predators...

with everything else that's going on, i feel like the biggest, scariest, most dangerous issue of our time is social media. it's not just dangerous for kids and teens, it's dangerous for everyone. and most of us are just going with it because we don't have much choice. and all the good people who try to make alternatives are just creating more of the same, because we haven't figured out a model for connecting people that encourages good, healthy behavior.

...

we rushed out to meet the window guy, who was "almost there" for about forty five minutes. but in addition to him proposing very satisfactory solutions, something made me ask him, on his way out, what it is exactly that he does for a living.

it turns out he's a contractor, and a carpenter.

gd and i looked at each other, and showed him one of the bigger issues we've been worried about, and which for him turned out to be null sweat ^_^

we then went to our new local hardware store to pick up a whole bunch of things - mostly to make sure we can fix and paint the walls in the old apartment properly - and stopped in at the nature store for hydration and snacks.

we measured the gas hob - the underside was revolting, and i cut my finger on it - and then rushed off to buy antiseptic ointment and an electric hob. they weren't in stock, so it'll only arrive on sunday, and it needs an electrician to install it, so it'll only be installed by tuesday or wednesday, and the hole in the counter isn't deep enough, so we'll either need a handyman to build up the area or, i realized later, to cut in a little deeper.

turns out we know a guy.

gd returned to our old place, i went to pick up mr smear from school and show him the "new" way to get home, and then we went to the new apartment to meet up with our new landlord and give him the cheques, and get the keys, and remove a couple of doors and the old oven and carry them down to his storage, and then our friend arrived to speak to him and was shocked to see that the electrician who installed the three-phase plug did something wrong (both from a regulations point of view, and ethically from a cheated-us point of view).

so that's another thing we need to deal with on sunday...

from there we returned to the old apartment, i had breakfast and mr smear and i took a bag of clothing to the donation bin, and the next while was spent fighting over how to proceed, and then proceeding. by the time the new tenant came by to examine our things more carefully, we had a load of sensitive stuff ready to go.

he might take our sofa, he might let us leave the big shelf up, he might take the curtains. but he's not taking the projector. and when i turned it on to demonstrate his response made me sad: we've gotten used to it not being able to focus properly, and not being particularly sharp to begin with. our little projector probably isn't worth much, and i don't think we really have place for it in the new apartment, but it's been with us for so long and we've had such good times with it 😭

i booked a car for an hour, and in that hour managed to pick it up, drive it home, load it with all the things while mr smear "stood guard", drive it to the new apartment, unload it, get everything upstairs and into the apartment, drive to the city market, pick up a bottle of wine, and get it back to its parking spot. and mr smear and i had a great time rocking out to slipknot and synthknot along the way 🤘

...

it's shabbat, and even though tomorrow's going to be tough, we made a point of stopping in the evening, lighting candles and making kiddush for the last time in this apartment, singing loudly and drinking wine and eating vegan burgers and reading the colour of magic (even before bedtime)...

the drain

 yesterday:

you know what's a surprisingly good feeling? when i arrive to pick up mr smear after 7.5 hours with his friend and he's clearly bummed out that their time is over.

the return home with was really fun.

it was an easy evening, i read some the colour of magic (we've restarted it, i hope he's ready for it this time) at bedtime and then the evening went into a bunch of random stuff, not least of which being writing up my earlier LLM experience into an article.

today:

i struggled to sleep last night.

the morning started off pretty well, and when mr smear left gd and i launched into removing the paintings from the walls and getting the screws / fisher plugs out. and realizing that *i* was guilty of mixing posidriv and phillips screws throughout the apartment :$

i took care of a bunch of other small things, and then left for the bank to organize a bank guarantee.

...

it's 2026 already. we have ai, robots, and a new evolution of CRISPR, but there i found myself, walking out of the bank after TWO HOURS signing arbitrary pieces of paper to acquire a document allowing me to promise my own money to someone else 😒

and then, OMFG.  just as i got on the bus to get to the office, i received an sms from the bank saying that my chequebook is available for pickup 😡

...

the bank experience really drained me. i got to the office, drank a coffee, and got back to working on my language detection model. i did that for an hour, then had lunch with the other dev who was working from the office, and then he left. i got some more work done before the only other person in the office, who was on the complete other side of it, lost his temper with someone on the phone. i tried not to eavesdrop, ending up suspecting that he'd been yelling at his kids :P

the work itself went sideways. first, when after two days of investment into testing this model, and some apparently good guesswork about some of the bigger languages (french and german, amongst others), i discovered that the model couldn't distinguish between english and russian. at that point, the mapping no longer mattered and i stopped what i was doing to investigate the existing solution.

that was when i learned that the elasticsearch language detection model isn't very reliable either, and that my client has a fair amount of garbage detections in its dataset. i also learned that i have a real advantage in evaluating language detections models because i'm familiar enough with quite a few very different languages.

so the model i've been evaluating is out, though i have infrastructure available to evaluate others (if i can find any reliable ones with labels), and i've established that there's no point in training our own model on our production data. i'm probably going to have to find out how n-gram language detection stacks up...

i left early myself and caught a bus home, authorizing mr smear to go with his friend to the comics library and on to his place. that made it easier for gd and i to go to the new apartment to sign the contract.

we were there for quite a while, it's looking considerably better, and this guy's really giving good vibes as a landlord. i didn't realize how hard it would be for him to grip a pen (he's very handicapped), and there were clauses that neither of us could figure out who should do what with...

we left with a key so gd and i can get started, cleaning it up and moving small things, and taking pre-inspection photos and organizing whatever fixes he missed.

i dropped my bag off at home, then walked to the square to wait for mr smear. he didn't need me to do that.

when we got home he dropped a bombshell - he and his friend watched the first episode of rick & morty today 🤦‍♂️

i fired off a message to his friend's dad - he's never seen the series - explaining that i understand that we'll never have full control, but that i'd appreciate it if his son understands that it's wrong and that he shouldn't share it with mr smear... he responded quickly and warmly, i hope we align.

mr smear has long hebrew homework due tuesday, so after a brief debrief on the rick & morty episode we got through a chunk of it and then had dinner, and then got through the shower/bedtime rituals (showering without a shower curtain again), and after getting mr smear into bed* i got caught up in getting gd's ipad upgraded, which led to some yak shaving in an attempt to free up enough space, which eventually led to an understanding that it's not possible to update the ipad software and apple's successfully coercing us to either abandon it or trade it in.

i fucking HATE apple.

* it took him forever to go to sleep, though

i'm absolutely exhausted, i think i need to go to bed. i hope i actually get some sleep tonight.

going around in circles

i feel like i'm trapped between rocks and hard places.

i have a sinking feeling that i'm out of time for the embedded model solution i've been working on, but at the same time i have the boss *strongly* encouraging me to continue and i do feel like i'm *almost* there.

last night the woman from the morning contacted me to say the apartment's too small for her.

i had a rough night last night, the new cream doesn't seem to be doing its thing. gd was up all night too, so we were both a bit miserable this morning...

mr smear, meanwhile, woke up just a little *too* excitable and loud :/

for both him and me, the early morning was predominantly about moon knight and getting the midi device playing nicely with garageband.

then we hopped on a weekend bus to his friend's place, and i moseyed on to the museum (picking up a coffee next to habima on the way), and i spent about three hours tinkering with local LLM development until my battery almost died.

i came home for a while, now i'm on my way to pick up my boy and return home again.