Weeknote #44 (20250720-20250726)

meta

Need to keep reminding myself that living in unprecedented times really fucking sucks, and that it is okay to not be okay.

did

  • started off the work week by finishing up the docker container build
  • also at work, finalized and published the rubella blog post
  • celebrated our 32nd wedding anniversary on Thursday
  • took Friday off to trek up Portland-ways, so Mx18 could sign various legal things (power of attorney, etc) that should make it easier to manage things from over here if something goes extremely wrong while they’re away at school
  • otherwise, just not a terribly memorable week?

exercise & shoulder recovery

  • Sunday: nothing
  • Monday: ran C25K W6D2 in the afternoon, then did stretches
  • Tuesday: stretches in the morning, gym in the afternoon
  • Wednesday: morning stretches, didn’t run/walk because …hot
  • Thursday: stretches in the morning, gym in the afternoon
  • Friday: run C25K W6D3 first thing in the morning, then did stretches
  • Saturday: some light walking

read

  • “It Awaits Your Experiments.” — this is just absolutely amazing and you need to read it. Any sort of pull quote would spoil it, just …trust me here, read this one, if you ever read anything I ever link, read this.

  • “I’m Tired of Talking About AI” is a very good summary of almost exactly where I’m at with GenAI at the moment too

  • “Never Forget What They’ve Done”

    There are so many great things about technology, things I fucking love, and Large Language Models do not resemble their form or intention. There is nothing about an LLM that feels like it’s built to provide a real service, other than some sort-of fraudulent copy of something else lacking its soul or utility. Those that actually use them in their daily work talk about them as exciting tools that help them improve workflows - not like they’re the next big thing.

  • I kinda want to quote the whole damn thing, but I’m gonna settle for a few excerpts — but “The Copilot Delusion” is worth your whole entire attention while reading. (Not for nothing, but I described it as “Ginsburg-ian” on social media and I’ll stand by that, the author has a real gift for a turn of phrase.)

    You want real connection to code? You earn that. You dig in. You wrestle with segfaults at 3 in the morning. You pace your apartment muttering about pointer arithmetic. You burn through Handmade Hero until you get it. You write your own damn notes instead of snapping lecture slides and pretending it counts. When you outsource the thinking, you outsource the learning. You become a conduit for a mechanical bird regurgitating it’s hunt directly into your baby-bird mouth. You don’t know your code. You’re babysitting it.

    …

    But the bot? The bot? The bot has no clue.

    …

    The bot has zero understanding. It can’t tell a page fault from a paper cut. It’ll hallucinate a memory model like I hallucinate after 2 days of no sleep. It can’t profile. It can’t understand a flamegraph. It can’t feel the cold burn of wasted CPU cycles on a hot loop. It’ll copy the advice of a sweaty stranger from an ‘08 StackOverflow thread who was benchmarking on a Pentium 4 with 512MB of RAM and a dream. It will say, “This is optimal”, like it knows anything. Like it’s seen a cache miss. It hasn’t. You have.

    …

    The real horror isn’t that AI will take our jobs. It’s that it will entice people who never wanted the job to begin with. People who don’t care for quality. It’ll remove the already tiny barrier to entry that at-least required people to try and comprehend control flow. Vampires with SaaS dreams and Web3 in their LinkedIn bio. Empty husks who see the terminal not as a frontier, but as a shovel for digging up VC money. They’ll drool over their GitHub Copilot like it’s the holy spirit of productivity, pumping out React CRUD like it’s oxygen. They’ll fork VS Code yet again, just to sell the same dream to a similarly deluded kid.

    There was once magic here. There was once madness.

watched

  • more Criminal Minds
  • Part of MLS All-Star game
  • Timbers-LAFC on Friday night, fun match and a justified 3 points for our side!

cooked

  • grilled hot dogs and sausages, on Monday
  • muffaletta on Tuesday
  • grilled spatchcocked chicken, simple greens side salad on Wednesday
  • grilled steaks and fingerling potatoes on Thursday