Sam's L33t Journal

My work has been very busy, as has Julie's.

Ink Jetpack is in beta, and developer relations published an elaborate sample app demonstrating it's capabilities.

Last weekend, I took Erica to the Day of the Dead event at the Peabody Museum. Erica had fun with all the craft activities. And we all went to the singalong theatrical release of K-Pop Demon Hunters with one of Erica's friends and their family. Was pretty fun, I see why that film has been so popular.

The Somerville election happened. All the ballot questions passed. Jake Wilson will be our new mayor. Three of four on Somerville YIMBY's councilor-at-large slate were elected.

This weekend, I took Erica to the new special exhibit at the MFA focusing on the work of Winslow Homer, especially his watercolor. Really cool.

I cooked an easy orange chicken for dinner tonight, which turned out really well even though I was completely winging it on the recipe.

I finished reading The Difference Engine and started reading Souls in the Great Machine, connected by the odd thread of both being sci-fi about unusual computers. The first is basically alt-history of "what if Babbage's analytical engine was actually built and the computer age started about 100 years early?" The second is far-post-apocalyptic sci-fi featuring a massive human-powered computer. That second book is part of a trilogy. For some reason I read the middle book in that trilogy, Eyes of the Calculator, a long while ago, then got the sequel, then realized it was the middle book and thought I should read the first book first, then didn't get around to that until now.

Still feeling like I'm not keeping up with what's going on. I'm doing some good cooking, though.

There was a second community meeting about the apartment building that's going to replace a falling-down ruin of a house in my neighborhood. The revised designs look pretty great.

There is an ongoing government shutdown because Republicans can neither compromise nor achieve unanimity within their own governing coalition. They've pasted "radical Democrat shutdown" across every government email and website, though. The shutdown hasn't prevented them from going on about which part of the US the government is allegedly at war with this week. Meanwhile, Trump's tasked a lawyer who has yet to prosecute a criminal case with making James Comey rue the day that he ever crossed Hillary Clinton. And Trump is rumbling about how he'll talk to the DOJ about a pardon for Ghislaine Maxwell (who he doesn't remember and probably hasn't even heard about before, to take it from him).

Basically the last week it's been highs in the 80s, though it's early October.

I started reading The Magician's Nephew to Erica.

Some new people are joining my team at work. Looking forward to the organizational rebuilding.

My mom will be visiting town next weekend, for her high school reunion.

I've been thinking about AI a lot this week, in particular this hilarious take on OpenAI's approach to AI development, "If OpenAI Made Black Holes" and the AI 2027 scenario (including this very good video summary).

Still trying to make more of AI coding tools in my job. Those can be a real boost to productivity. These models aren't the best software engineers, a bit stumble-y, but they're very, very versatile, and they can write fast. It's impressive, and unsettling. As Cory Doctorow notes, It's not about whether AI can do your job per se.

Work's been chaotic, I'm moving on to fifth manager since 2022 since ours is changing teams. This was my first time reporting to someone less senior than myself in terms of span on company, team, and career, but two of my previous three managers have been less senior in some of those metrics. I'm a little fish in a big pond, struggling, even thinking this means I'm not cut out for it.

I've started playing Patrick's Parabox a mind-bending block-pushing puzzle game. Great so far. Reminds me of Baba is You, in that it's a block-pushing puzzle game with a twist: In Baba is You the rules of the game are also blocks, in Patrick's Parabox the rooms of the puzzle are blocks.

Last week was a stressful week, and it was capped off by layoffs hitting my immediate area of the Goog. The layoffs were maximum chaos style, insta-cutoff, no transitions, total surprise for us but also several levels up the management chain. I'm still employed, but my team, which had gone from twelve active engineers at the start of last year to six by the end (not due to layoffs, just attrition, but organizational factors were in play), is now further down to four (with three active because one is on leave). I'd already thought things were pretty reduced, but now they're downright osseous (as in "cut to the ____" or worse, "we're _____"). I don't have a foot out the door, but at this point I feel like I ought to have both eyes out the window. I updated my resume, which I hadn't done for a long time.

This weekend was a pretty good break, at least. Did some cooking. I took Erica to see the latest special exhibit at the MFA ("Van Gogh: The Roulin Family Portraits"). I've been enjoying playing Death's Door, a humorously spooky indie adventure game which in aesthetic seems somewhere between the newer 2D Zelda games, Persona, and Dark Souls.

Solo-parenting tonight and tomorrow because Julie is making a day-trip to the land of finance. Busy busy.

It's been a week of very busy work. I've been digging some of the new AI coding tools, and man the stuff is pretty mind-blowing. My work this week involved grinding through a lot of complex refactoring, and it sure helped with the boilerplate.

What else: My trip with Erica back to Boston last weekend was very uneventful, compared to the way out. Perfectly smooth.

I tried to get in some cookbook cooking during the week. Last Sunday, I cooked Ana Sortun's recipe for tuna and fennel sarikopites (a phyllo-wrapped stuffed pastry, wound into a spiral shape) from her cookbook, Spice: Flavors of the Eastern Mediterranean. Sortun describes first cooking this in the kitchen of Sari Abul-Jubein's restaurant, Casablanca. The owner was tickled to have a dish on the menu corresponding to his name. (I was curious what Abul-Jubein has been up to since Casablanca closed in 2012. Apparently he only managed a few years of retirement before going back to work as a real estate agent for another decade. Some people are bad at retiring.) Anyways, the sarikopites turned out great, and Erica really enjoyed working on it.

This weekend, Erica's selection of cooking project was challah, a recipe from Melissa Clark's Kid in the Kitchen.

Well, I got in a few days of regular writing before I dipped beneath the waves again.

Today is Halloween, and it's not even the scariest day in the next week. I really do want the madness to end. 2017-2020 was objectively nuts, and that was before the realignment within the Republican Party had really completed and Trump was still being arm-twisted into hiring people to important questions who resisted his dumbest ideas (a major restraint for someone so bad at in-person confrontation). Stuff like this is going to be hilarious if he loses (Four Seasons all over again), but for now I just can't deal with the fact that it's so close.

Took Erica trick-or-treating and she had a good time time, except for encountering someone in one of those stilt ghost costumes that she found completely terrifying. The weather was warm today, high of almost 80, so the evening was summery.

Work is very busy, and once again one of my more senior colleagues is changing teams. Too much churn this year.

Today, went to Boda Borg for the first time with some of my work teammates as a fun event. Was pretty fun, I probably enjoyed it more than Level99. Afterwards, we went to Mineirao Steakhouse for lunch, which was delicious.

After an abbreviated workday, went to a Dads of Camberville Dad's Night Out event. A very nice break to get a night out for myself after a lot of extra-hard work on the home-front. This one was at The Sea Hag in Harvard, a new-ish (2023) bar from the same owners as Grendel's Den. Food and drinks were very tasty, and the staff were very hospitable and on top of things. Was good to see various people in the dads group again.

There's been a cold going around, and the whole family has been under the weather this week.

I guess I can say that Julie's out at Jura (as of some time ago, the cause of all the chaos the last many weeks at this point), so she's looking for the next thing. That's about all I can say about it.

I can now say that I have had the opportunity to successfully defend myself (and my condo association) in court. I sure hope my work on that project is done now.

Next week, Julie is going to a BiotechBikers event in Girona, Spain. Seems like it will be quite a fun cycling trip.

Erica has become quite a skilled Ticket to Ride player, though she's still quite put out when I win.

I went out with Julie last night to Gufo, an Italian restaurant which has opened up in the old Loyal Nine space on Cambridge Street. Still sad that Loyal Nine is no longer with us, they were one of the town's greatest dining experiences all the way through the pandemic and only declined after. But I'm glad such a great space isn't staying vacant. The new place seems to have done some substantial renovations (extending the bar, adding a full-sized pizza oven to the cafe space, upgrading the covered porch (a thrown-together plywood-construction COVID era addition) with sturdier materials). Was really beautiful and the food was fantastic.

It's been busy the last few weekends. Two weekends ago, took a trip to the aquarium with Erica and Mary. Last weekend, Julie was out of town all weekend for college reunion. Saturday was a rainy day at home, but we did a bunch of stuff. Sunday we went climbing in the morning and then to Somerville's Halloween street festival in the afternoon.

This past Thursday, Google had their first office family event for some time, at Boston Lights at Franklin Park Zoo. Really beautiful, though I miss the old winter holiday parties, which are likely to remain a thing of good times past.

Despite that, and despite the weekend of solo parenting going pretty well, I felt pretty crushed this week. Friday, I felt a bit better, and the weather was really beautiful. We went out for dinner that night, joined by one of Erica's friends, Mabel. Saturday also had beautiful weather, and Julie went to the zoo with Eric and Mabel and Mabel's dad, while I had a relaxed day closer to home and went to the Union Square Farmers Market (last of the season) and did some cooking.

Today, the weather is cooler and rainy. I took Erica to a friend's birthday party in the morning. Erica has been in a very stormy mood today, but now she's working on her Halloween costume with Julie.

New Mario game is pretty fun.

Too much going on, here and around. So multipost time:

The Biden docs - So it turns out that Biden and everyone left classified docs everywhere in the course of their work? It definitely seems that several things are broken with how this sort of stuff is managed, but it's super-aggravating that's going to be the basis for equivocation between Biden (and Pence, and whoever) misplacing a few confidential things in the course of their work and Trump (who AFAICT did not work) just walking out the doors with boxes and boxes of the stuff because he thinks he's still President, and then trying like seventeen contradictory coverups when people noticed he was just waving the docs around to whoever. At the very least.

Been meaning to say something on the topic for ages and failing. Why does the situation have to be so dumb?!

The SOTU - Seems it went well for the Democrats, when it garners feedback like this and this. Even Trump had some positive words. (What happened, he watch the speech alone? Get Trump into a one-on-one with Biden and Trump will wind up liking the guy. Temporarily, anyways. He's malleable.)

Google's AI push - Gonna be "fun" with the "Google goes all-in on something" push, hope it goes better than last time. So far this hard steering (maximum chaos layoffs, product launches timed by external factors) does not seem to have helped the company in investors' eyes. The most amusing framework (though not exactly totally accurate, it over-implies the market does things for reasons) is that the James Webb Space Telescope managed to cost Google more than NASA.

On more prosaic work notes, the new desk space is working out pretty well. Same building, higher floor, but just across a connector from one of the new building's new cafeterias.

Weathering the weather whatever the weather - For February, this weather is wild, and that first letter is upside-down. Might make it through the whole winter without a significant snow-day, we'll see.

Tunic - I started playing a new game, an old-school Zelda meets Dark Souls number and it is glorious. It's fun and beautiful and charming. The aforementioned mashup of elements aside, a key feature of this game is that it captures one of the interesting aspects of exploration in old-school gaming by putting much of the interface in mysterious runes, not really explaining how things work in the game's normal flow, and giving you a beautiful but partially-complete manual, written in an unknown language with a few familiar words, with penciled-in margin notes. Some real nostalgia there, I suppose (it's potent anemoia in my case), for those who had some experience playing import-only games from a nation with a long tradition of video gaming innovation and also throwing in a few English words for spice.

The further twist is that the pages of this manual are a collectible item in the game. Don't ask too much about how that works diagetically, I don't know that there's a coherent explanation for that at all, but it's really effective in making knowledge about how the game works (whether figured out through collection and interpretation or unguided exploration) a well-won prize, while still handing out key bits of knowledge that end up being as much "the thing that unlocks the next area" as the in-game items.

Magic - New set's out, as the ancient evil that wants to compleately perfect Magic's multiverse by turning everyone into Geiger-esque cyborg monstrosities has broken the shell of the world (of Mirroden) and launched their omninvasion, with the heroes' plan to stop that definitely not going as planned. The set's pretty fun so far, at least there's some new stuff to shake up Standard. I played two rounds of sealed today, cratered 1-3 in the first but went 7-1 in the second (limited matches in Magic: Arena go to the first of seven wins or three losses). That second match had it all: Managing to overcome an opponent who played two copies of The Eternal Wanderer (wish my sealed pools were like that, that's for sure), braining an opponent with that third ability on The Filigree Sylex, and combining Paladin of Predation and Sylvok Battle-Chair to defeat my last opponent two ways simultaneously.