log.

Friday evening, the week so far, random odds and ends:

• Been mostly ill with a slightly annoying cold ever since Tuesday. Not really bad but enough to withdraw from office visits. With having been granted a new room, working on site feels more attractive all of a sudden, as working from home started feeling more limiting, distanced and encumbered by ones own surrounding slightly chaotic reality. Better luck hopefully next week. (Yes there's the option to get home office into a better shape too but what do you know.)
• At least, sorted out and threw away a bunch of old newspapers. The desire to keep beaten by the desire to free some space. Feels good immediately after but always quite a hurdle to get there.
• Bought and arranged fruits in the office as a newly acquired ritual encouraging people to show up, which actually works. Too, rearranging some aspects of the room layout to not have a door behind me anymore. People being able enter virtually every minute without me noticing is a slightly uncanny experience (and one of the things pro home-office for sure).
• Updated slides and code snippets for a re-occurring internal training. Tried to synthetically expand sample data and failed. Got that large language model of choice into a state of running into randomness and hallucinations earlier than I thought. Slightly unsettled by learning how much time can be lost this way, to simply experimenting with a blackbox in a somewhat crude stimulus/response or trial-and-error kind of pattern. Learnt and shivered about Vibe Coding. Still clueless in light of the idea of LLMs to make technology more "democratic" which seems to completely leave out the side aspect of hardware being quite expensive still and quite a bunch especially of the predominant models and ecosystems dominated by a few large vendors.
• Made a bunch of calls quite outside of ones own comfort zone. Worked, with a bit of that usual anxiety before and that enthusiasm afterwards. Needs to be applied in small dosages. Still, learnt that in some cases getting closer to solving things is actually making a rough plan and then starting getting something done that might lead there.
• Noticed how incredibly much certain companies (specifically Microsoft) are tightening their grip on ones own technological life. An uncanny and concerning feel, more so knowing in a lot of cases responses to that are just shrugging and moving on. All along these lines, learnt about Koofr and liked what I saw. There's no shortcoming in susbstitute technologies at least for some aspects of the whole stack.
• Considered ditching Brave for Vivaldi, the former being open-source but somewhat shady in some aspects, the latter being built in Europe but closed-source and based on Chromium as well. Once again learnt how difficult deciding even for alternative technologies is when priorities clash. See Ecosia Search as well, or virtually any independent app that lives inside of a Google or Apple app store ecosystem.
• Been out to have Italian food later the week, as well as having a coffee and a piece of cake at the library once or twice. Café Tutti is a recent discovery and growing addiction, also given the somewhat enticing and inspiring surroundings of a public library and the diverse, vibrant crowd of people to meet out there.
• Went to the garden earlier, cleaned up the beds and lawn a bit, had coffee in between flowers and bushes slowly turning green again. Things are still behind compared to last year but season will really start as soon as water is back anyway so guess it's time to be patient and accept the speed of things.
• Bought a poetry book out of an impulse. Enjoyed (and was surprised by) two new tracks by artists I really appreciate. Didn't read enough nor listen to enough music though. For both, time spent at home is time missed in between while commuting.

Have a pleasant and inspiring weekend wherever you are!

Filed under: