Weeknote #46 (20250803-20250809)

meta

The countdown to Mx18’s departure continues; the packing and other chaos continues to escalate. On and on it goes…

did

  • Sunday, we finally made it to local fave Epilogue’s Sunday community dinner — it was great, we will be back! (But probably not until we’re back from the move in…)
  • I updated my now page, please clap
  • At work, the annual lab retreat happened this week. I went last year and really enjoyed it, but with the college move chaos and all the travel involved with that, I decided to sit this year’s retreat out — which meant a pretty quiet mostly head-down week for me
  • A lot of that head down time was continuing to port another section of the website over to the newer App Router version of Next.js
  • I went to the Spark Studio Salem social meeting on Tuesday, and was at least minimally social
  • On Saturday, we went up to the Portland area and met up with an old family friend so they could hang out with Mx18 a bit while they’re still here. We had lunch at the new-ish Pfriem Tasting Room in Milwaukie, and then played a round of mini-golf in Wilsonville; it was fun but also really damn hot

exercise & shoulder recovery

  • Sunday: nothing
  • Monday: stretches, ran c25k w7d3
  • Tuesday: stretches, gym in the afternoon
  • Wednesday: stretches, otherwise rest day
  • Thursday: stretches, gym in the afternoon
  • Friday: run c25k w8d1, then stretches
  • Saturday: stretches, 18 WHOLE HOLES OF MINI-GOLF

read

  • If you’re remote, ramble

    A tip for remote teams of 2-10 people. Create a personal “ramblings” channel for each teammate in your team’s chat app of choice.

    Ramblings channels let everyone share what’s on their mind without cluttering group channels. Think of them as personal journals or microblogs inside your team’s chat app, a lightweight way to add ambient social cohesion.

  • The Amazing Art of the Video Game Marquee has some amazing photos of old video game cabinets, recommended if you were ever an arcade fiend

  • The fuckity-fuck cycle we’re in right now. is draught of cool water after a hot walk in the sun

    Today we have SUVs that all look like melted soap bars designed by committees who’ve never had an original thought. Greige everything because god forbid we use any of the other one hundred and nineteen colors available. Political paralysis dressed up as discourse while nothing gets fixed or solved. Watergate level corruption runs amok, unchecked. We’re all just stuck refreshing our browsers, doom scrolling, hoping something will change while the algorithms feed us more of the same tepid blaring bullshit.

    …

    We’re roughly five to seven years into our current fuckity-fuck cycle. It started somewhere between 2016 and 2020, depending on whether you trace it to political breakdown, pandemic fallout, or cheap money funding the latest tech expansion. If the historical pattern holds, we’re in the lame, ugly middle phase—not the start, not the end. Just the long slog where everything feels stuck.

    But here’s what I found digging into this pattern: these gray periods always end with an explosion of color, creativity, and possibility. Always.

  • I read the Recurse Center’s “Developing our position on AI” and found it to be deeply disappointing in how they choose to scope the problem, so as to hand-wave away all of the actually serious aspects of the problem. I had thought more highly of RC, but this is very weak sauce

  • No, AI is not Making Engineers 10x as Productive

    I think a lot of the more genuine 10x AI hype is coming from people who are simply in the honeymoon phase or haven’t sat down to actually consider what 10x improvement means mathematically. I wouldn’t be surprised to learn AI helps many engineers do certain tasks 20-50% faster, but the nature of software bottlenecks mean this doesn’t translate to a 20% productivity increase and certainly not a 10x increase.

    …

    Bootcamps and AI are just examples in a long series of poorly born out threats to commoditize the highly expensive, highly professionalized field of software engineering. They are rhetorical devices designed to imply precarity. Your boss can’t actually fire you and replace you with AI, but he can make you feel like he could, and maybe not ask for that raise.

listened

watched

  • lots of Leagues Cup matches, but now that the Timbers have crashed out, probably not a lot more
  • some more episodes of Criminal Minds S2
  • also watched an intensely shitty Timbers match on Saturday
  • in 2014, Bruce Springsteen took Tom Morello on tour to Australia, and they covered INXS’s “Don’t Change”, and it is just as good as you would hope
  • I found this fan-vid of “Lost in Translation” bits set to JAMC’s “Just Like Honey” and it is also amazing
  • speaking of fanvids, I also found “Attack On The Death Star To Thunderstruck”. This is very much a “you’re in the demo or you’re not” thing, but if you are, you’re welcome
  • finally, in this week’s crawl through the dustier corners of YouTube, I found Built To Spill covering “Age of Consent”

cooked

  • cheese enchiladas on Monday
  • grilled sausages, Wednesday
  • grilled shrimp tacos, Thursday
  • carnitas and guacamole, Friday

photo

Two chili dogs from the new Good Dogs in downtown Salem

I think we’re supposed to call them “glizzies” now, but “chili glizzy” sounds silly.

looking forward to

My feelings around Mx18 heading off to school remain solidly fixed on “mixed”, but I’m looking forward to getting some NYC dirt under my feet again, it’s been too long.