weeknotes for w/c 13/01/25

made a concerted effort to do a little more this week, and i have quite a bit of motivation and some executive function. this week has been a little hard, as i've been oscillating between incredible hope for the future and crushing existential dread

• got ~60% of my tasks done this week. that's much better than last week, and i'm glad i managed to get a lot done!
  • spent some time pruning the backlog in the early hours of Monday morning. it's quite interesting reflecting all the things i need to do at some point. putting the tasks in order helps quite a bit with my motivation too
  • i think i was slightly rattled by last week's metric that i only accomplished 30% of what i set out to do.
  • i'm familiar with Goodhart's Law. however, if i try to game my task completion during a cycle then i lose an incredibly valuable metric that i put a lot of effort into collecting.
  • i'm considering using points to gauge the size of tasks, but that feels too corporate and project manager-y. i just need to not overthink it
• had a really productive Monday, and i feel i smashed it!
• went to AIDLE this week Tuesday!
  • went to Monohon, a lovely Japanese ramen restaurant, on Old Street before the event. luckily there was no queue
  • learnt about "dark data" and how businesses struggle to extract value from ~80% of the data they collect because it's unstructured. organisations can use NLP, image recognition, anomaly detection and other ML techniques to extract value from dark data
  • learnt about anonymisation techniques when using LLMs
  • saw Rachel-Lee Nabors' crash course on AI, got some good reading recommendations including Artificial Intelligence: A Modern Approach and Grokking Deep Learning
• had a good 2.5hr nap on Thursday. it was so good.
• spoke with a few friends about my plans for the future, and they feel a little overwhelming and impossible to achieve. i feel like i'm trying to live multiple lifetimes in one
• continued with job applications this week
  • had three interviews
  • i'm waiting to hear back from a couple positions from last week, and have two calls booked in for next week
  • speaking to two recruiters, including one focussed on contracting
  • got a couple of rejection. a little disheartening, but not all hope is lost. it only takes one offer, anyway
• reviewed some proposals for codebar Festival. there were plenty of incredibly strong proposals this year
• ran a large LLM job for a client with ~30K entries. i'm not pro-LLM replacing people's jobs, but it's nice to have a model to menial text processing tasks at scale
• food shop got delivered. i accidentally ordered two packs of mushrooms, so i have to do something with them
• went to IKEA, and finally got some spare parts for my broken bed. the ones they didn't have in stock, they ordered from the Internet.
  • i should get them at some point next week, and i'll soon be able to get a restful night's sleep
  • this MALM bed frame has been going strong for four years, despite being disassembled once
  • made an attempt to fix a drawer with lots of PVA wood glue and some screws. it surprisingly worked
• had a pleasant half-hour canal walk and then lunch at a pub on Saturday, before going to a friend's board game night
  • got fish and chips with mushy peas, some coleslaw and two pints of Fosters
  • played Splendor, Oh My Pigeons! and Saboteur for four hours