Weeknote #48 (20250817-20250823)

meta

This was a really discombobulated week — poor sleep, high anxiety — but at the end of it I got to meet back up with Mx18 and TheWife in NY — so all’s well that ends well?

did

  • whenever TheWife is away and I’m at home, I have trouble sleeping — doesn’t happen when I travel, fortunately, but there’s something about sleeping in our home bed, by myself, that’s just not great. Saturday night wasn’t too bad, but Sunday night was wretched, to the point where I took a sick day on Monday because my brain just didn’t want to brain
  • relatedly: not the most productive work week, really
  • Thursday evening, I handed off Ms22 to one of her coterie of care workers, and drove up to a PDX-area hotel for an absolutely miserable night of little sleep
  • Friday, Ms22 became Ms23 🎂 and I flew over to JFK ✈ and eventually (after a couple trains, a bus, and a bit of a stroll down some sidewalk-less Long Island streets) met up with Mx18 and TheWife at a hotel near Mx18’s college
  • Saturday, we did some additional shopping for Mx18’s dorm room, and then enjoyed an extremely nice meal at Hendrick’s Tavern to celebrate Mx18 leaving home and starting college

read

  • This is a great read: “Hold My Beer No More”

    “Hold my beer” is what you say to your cousin on the raft right before you try shooting the fish that haven’t been taking the bait. It’s what you say right before you try to grab an alligator by the snout, because you saw someone do it on YouTube. It’s what comes right before you cliff jump into a pond, get on an improvised zip line, or try cocaine for the first time.

    You can call us stupid, because we definitely are. But nobody denied that Americans were fun. When an American says hold my beer, someone inevitably reaches over to take it, and steps back to observe the mayhem from a safe® distance. We may end up with scars, but we’ll get a story to go with them.

    But that fun, that’s getting complicated in these, the waning days of the American spirit.

  • The Futzing Fraction

    Taken together, this all means that for any consequential task that you want to accomplish with genAI, you need an expert human in the loop. The human must be capable of independently doing the job that the genAI system is being asked to accomplish.

    When the genAI guesses correctly and produces usable output, some of the human’s time will be saved. When the genAI guesses wrong and produces hallucinatory gibberish or even “correct” output that nevertheless fails to account for some unstated but necessary property such as security or scale, some of the human’s time will be wasted evaluating it and re-trying it.

    If, at this point, you’re asking “what the fuck is the point then?” …read the rest of the linked post. (Maybe read the blog post even if you’re not, because I think it makes a whole bundle of good points about what the devops folks would call the “blast radius” of using these tools…)

  • This is an oldie but — if you use git at all — a real goodie: Git from the inside out

looking forward to

Getting Mx18 moved in and then getting a little personal time in the city with TheWife — hopefully, I’m going to see a few former co-workers and get caught up with them!

Bonus “not looking forward to”: next Thursday, we’ll say goodbye to Mx18, most likely until they come home for the winter holiday break. That’s gonna be a rough day, I expect.