weeknotes for w/c 20/01/25

i drafted this while in Belgium, sitting in a FOSDEM talk about how to be an effective networker in open source. i'm publishing this ~a week after the fact. sorry this post is late, but i'm working on being more punctual with my little rituals.

• visited the Creative Computing Institute at UAL this week, got a tour of the Camberwell campus. they're doing a lot of interesting stuff with textiles and soldering
• job search is happening
  • applied for more jobs on Tuesday
  • feeling a little hopeless. there’s little to no gratification in searching for a job, not no way to extract it either since the process is so long. I’m at 34 applications which doesn’t seem like a lot, but it’s a lot for me
  • four initial interviews booked for next week. Waiting to hear back from one hiring manager interview. 
• got ML models running locally with GPU inference, all the buzz around Deepseek got me interested! i expected it to be more complicated but local tooling is simple enough to set up, especially with Coolify's templates
  • it’s shockingly snappy for Mistral, Llama 3.2, Phi 4 and Deepseek R1
  • i’m running an Nvidia 3060 with 12gb of RAM
• it was a little confusing downloading models, but got it working eventually. downloading models using Ollama through Open WebUI is buried under a lot of stuff
• been stress eating a lot
• was supposed to go to the UK Statistics Assembly on Wednesday. I didn’t have the energy to go, unfortunately
• IKEA parts didn’t get ordered because I didn’t confirm them via email. Had to order them again. looks like ordering them in store uses a different flow to the self service one online (because I’ve done this before and ordering them again myself, they instantly went through)
• tried to manually update Docker Compose on macOS, and it was a massive fucking pain. looks like Docker’s plugins folder at /usr/local/lib/docker/cli-plugins is symlinked to /Applications/Docker.app/Contents/Resources/cli-plugins. macOS will happily let you delete binaries in .apps, but heaven forbid if you try to add anything. to fix it, I simply reinstalled docker desktop
• building out some self-hosted small tech, which I'm excited for
• went to see a screening of Ego Death by Jazz Emu followed by a Q&A in Rio Cinema in Dalston. it was a very funky project 
  • during the screening, it felt like he made the music and then cooked up a narrative. this was confirmed during the Q&A! I deeply respect it. 
• I believe most of the project's money was spent on the teeth prosthetics, but there’s also the puppeteering and the  animation and so much fake blood
• it was short but worth it my time and my money.
• reminds me of Tim Minchin, who says that a genius is a mentally ill person with an audience
• found a funny article on the Daily Mash about a millennial raw-dogging a coach journey, and it reminded me of my trip to Edinburgh
• went on a lovely canal walk with an ex colleague from Monzo, big walk almost four hours
  • my friends couldn't do a big walk this month, so this will make up for it
  • learnt about spaced repetition for language learning
• booked flights and hotels for FOSDEM in Belgium. catching the train would be lovely but unfortunately it was too late to get any good deals. excited to go with Willow, though
• Imberbus this year is on the 16th of August!