Dependency chains are fun. Yesterday was the first time I ever edited a Kodsnack episode because I realized I needed to get the episode image drawn. Drawing the image means I need the episode title (and, preferably, some additional idea from the topics to base the image on).

And so: the need to edit before I am able to draw.

There is a lot of time to finish up the actual episode, but what I realized was that this was the last opportunity where I had convenient access to my usual drawing tools.

So, the dependency chain brought me here, where I have maybe fifteen minutes of work left to do before publishing the episode next week. And that feels great! I should finish things early more often!

… except life and late changes of plans and information and everything else of course. But apart from that? Getting stuff done early just feels so good whenever it happens.

Today is also a day off, and I have exactly zero commitments. I spent and eternity (measured in my own relative time) this morning just having a cup of tea and listening to the rain, feeling the need to do nothing at all.

I hope and aim to keep that feeling all day.

Auto-interrupter

I sort of knew this already, but this week's episode of Econtalk brought self interruptions to the front of my mind. They discussed focus and interruptions, and then the guest (David Epstein) mentioned that your mind gets to used to interruptions that, even if you are left alone, you will tend to interrupt yourself with a distraction at about the same time intervals you are used to.

That rings true to me, and I have been thinking about when and how I interrupt myself during the week. I have not necessarily been any better at stopping myself, but I have at least noticed. A further realization is that I think my self interruptions are setting my focus interval to a much higher degree than any external forces.

This annoys me. I have been attempting to deal with this - so many times - by closing tabs, cancelling services, screen time, and all the other classics. But perhaps it can be easier to make progress if I just focus on the interval? I do not have to cut anything out (which could also avoid the classic of just replacing one distraction with another) - if I just focus on switching to any distraction slightly less often. Small changes are easier, and just trying to move in the right direction instead of hitting some hard target leaves much less opportunity to declare failure and just give up.

That could work, right? It sure will not hurt to try.

I am beginning to feel reasonably recovered from the whirlwind week.

Sun, summery warmth (when in the right wind-protected corner), and everything turning green all at once certainly helps too.

In one way, it feels like things will now stay calm until the summer holidays.

In another, it feels like those holidays are like two breaths away, and there are plenty of things in the calendar before they start too.

In any case, it does feel good to sit down in the evening - after work and dinner and dog walks - and at least feel caught up with what I hoped to get done during the day.

Then, that familiar thought starts seeping into my mind: is there something more I should be doing with the evening to feel even better? I would really like to find a good default way of dealing with that thought, because it usually leads me nowhere. It feels like a gateway to sitting around flipping between little things, not focusing on anything but not resting and recovering or really letting my mind wander either.

Still pretty relaxed as far as problems go, but also a very silly way of making a free evening just slightly worse.

Hey: books!

I finished another book! More everything forever was a great and easy read about the beliefs of singularitarians, effective altruists, and related people and billionaires of all sorts. It is one more on my growing pile of AI-related reading, and I am sure this is the first time since university I have ever bought this many books related to the same topic, and got through them so relatively quickly too. It is the kind of experience that makes one look back at university and wonder how one could manage to not enjoy studying then as much as one does now. (Does it matter slightly that I hand-picked my own course literature and read at precisely my own pace, without any tests afterward? It might …) We have touched on many of the topics of the books in Kodsnack episodes, but I think I want to do one or more directly related to them as well, because there is so much in there.

Which reminds me: I have a Murakami on my bedside table, only just started! There is a great thing to spend some unallocated evening time on!

By the way, I wrote this in Gram. It is a pretty darn nice little editor.

Today, I glanced at my watch, mentally prepared to find the time to be late afternoon heading into evening, instead finding it to be five minutes before noon.

I felt like a full day had easily passed already.

And this was just one day of the week.

The rest of it was mainly filled with the whirlwind of work's yearly user conference, and it was a blast all the way through. From internal conferencing with all of my colleagues (we were around 100 present, and even then almost 30% were not there!) to presentations, partying, quizzing, and chatting to users. So, so many great interactions.

Plus, I made a game - and stickers for it - that people played and seemed to enjoy. Did not have that on my bingo board last year, but that was also great fun.

I think I held up remarkably well energy-wise, but perhaps ten minutes into the bus ride back to the office I just closed my eyes slightly and teleported straight to Gothenburg.

Oh, and then the weekend contained a trip to celebrate a birthday. Great fun and got a quick look at a new city, but also two slightly outrageously early mornings.

And thus, the confusion about time this noon. Still, I seem to have managed to function into the afternoon and evening.

I would not be surprised if there is a decent energy dip yet to come. Probably right when I think I must surely have recovered.

Good thing there is a four-day work week coming up.

Thanks to everything going on, I have been spending quite a bit less time online than usual. My podcast queue is getting pretty long, and I have skipped a whole lot of stuff on Mastodon. On the whole, that feels great. It is like I got a soft natural break. Just enough, it seems, to have broken the Mastodon-checking reflex for now. When comparing to these in-person heavy days, it becomes very clear how little actual interaction I have on Mastodon and other online places. I read a lot, and I post a bit, but there sure is not much of actual discussion. There is not really room for it, either.

During bus rides and other travel time, I found myself drifting more toward music listening than podcasts as well.

I guess the need for more words was already well met.

After Spice Girls, Mel C had a period - like so many of us - of experimenting with the cloud.

When she came out of it, she wrote this song:

When the cloud costs more than I can understand
When uptime is not what I had planned
When AWS goes out and there's no end in sight
When Azure can't keep up all through the night

I turn 2 U
Like the admin reaching for a Sun
I turn 2 U
'Cause it's the better one
I can set it up
When US-EAST is down
I turn 2 U

When my boxes are racked with redundancy
They have the specs that will quiet me
They lift my uptime, they lower price
When I need web scale, when I need device

I turn 2 U
Like the admin reaching for a Sun
I turn 2 U
And call the server man
I can set it up
When US-EAST is down
I turn 2 U

What would I pay?
What would I do
If I had never made the move?
I hope some day if you've lost your way
You can curl to me (you can curl to me)
Like I curl to you

I turn 2 U
Like the admin reaching for a Sun
I turn 2 U
'Cause it's the better one
I can set it up
When US-EAST is down
I turn 2 U

I turn 2 U
When Google tells me to turn around
I turn 2 U
'Cause it's the better one
I can set it up
When US-EAST is down
I turn 2 U
I turn 2 U
I turn 2 U

(When Romans bought new togas in their favourite gladiator's colors)

Books: still nice.

I am in a bit of a reading period again. Much of the reading is preparing for a podcast episode, which is also a bit of a first as far as I can remember. Some reading, or an episode about a specific book, is nothing uncommon. But this time, I have read two books which add background and depth to the topic, and I have a third one I might be able to fit in too. That is new, and I like this new "deeper preparations for a episode, further in advance" track.

It will probably not become a habit, but I would definitely not mind if it did. Or some spinoff thing did.

Really, the most interesting question is if and how I manage to make use of all that background in the episode. We will find out.

The episode is on a topic in the "AI" radiation field, so in a way I have been preparing actively for more than a year, and passively for what, four? Can this bubble burst already, please?

I thought back to my AI bubble conference talk last year and realized that if anything, I would be more pointed and negative in my criticism now than then. Discovering more deeply educated writing on the topic has only strengthened my feeling that I was on the right track.